


Calling Out The Dead

by Guede



Series: Ghost Quest, Inc. [1]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Comedy of Errors, Figo Is A Massive Troll, Ghosts, Humor, Jealousy, Life Is David Villa's Enemy, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Medical Student David Villa, Pining, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:50:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 51,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4745285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four men and a haunted house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calling Out The Dead

For a few minutes, after they’d crowded through the door into the foyer, they all just stood there and looked silently about the place. It was a sunny day, but the windows were boarded up where the glass wasn’t absolutely filthy and so barely any light got inside. What did was strangely yellow and weak, as if the life had been stripped from it, and did little to illuminate the place. The rooms were bare of any furniture, but they were overflowing with dark wooden paneling and elaborate plasterwork that cast strange shadows on the walls and floor. The dust was so thick in some places that at first glance one would’ve taken it as sheets.

“I’m impressed with your ancestors’ sense of style,” David finally said. He walked out a bit from the group and kicked at a small amorphous blob that was drifting aimlessly about the floor. The dust-bunny exploded in a soundless puff and almost immediately remnants of it were tickling David’s nose. He sneezed hard, then shook himself as the echoes of his sneeze faded unevenly around them. “It’s like they knew we’d take one look at it and say to hell with this.”

Raúl had his back to David, but his shoulders tensed up. Then they slumped and the other man just emitted a sound that was the bastard cross of a sigh and the irritation for which Raúl was always too good. He jingled his keys in his hand, sorting through them with his fingers, then looked up at the stairway. “Nobody’s checked the upstairs in years, so I don’t know how safe it is. But there was a caretaker who lived down here and used the kitchen, so that should be all right, at least.”

“Guess he didn’t do much more than that.” David killed another dust-bunny before wandering towards the nearest room. He snorted when he heard another strangled sigh, then ducked his head through the doorway.

The floorboards creaked like crazy, but they didn’t feel rotten or weak beneath the feet, and the walls and ceiling didn’t have any holes in them, which was a far cry from David’s current place. Still, the dust was pretty damn thick…David pinched his nose and stifled another sneeze, then began to turn to the others.

Something caught his eye. Just a flicker, like a hand wiggling just beyond his range of vision, but when he looked back, he just saw an empty room. Whatever.

He went back to the middle of the room. Raúl had wandered off but could be heard messing around in the room on the other side; Fernando was leaning in the doorway, looking on and offering the occasional suggestion. Silva was still standing near the door, his arms wrapped tightly around himself even though it was a warm day. His shoulders were hunched and he kept darting quick glances around like he was nervous.

“Think it’s cree—” David started.

Eeping, Silva jumped several centimeters off the floor, then nearly fell on his face upon landing since he didn’t have his arms out for balance. He flailed, then gratefully collapsed on the arm David had stuck under his elbow. Silva blew out a relieved breath, glanced up at David and then abruptly bundled himself away, blushing furiously.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “You just—”

“What was that?” Raúl came back into the foyer and looked sternly at them, like he was on the clock. He wasn’t even in their department, the stupid hotshot prof. Yeah, yeah, youngest ever to make tenure, looks like a movie-star, all that, but he had no right to tell them what was what.

Silva waved his hands, then shook his head. He straightened up and grabbed the back of his neck, still looking uneasy under all that blushing. “It’s nothing, David just freaked me out. I mean, he startled me. No big deal. It’s cool. Um, how’s the kitchen?”

For a moment Raúl just stared at Silva as if Silva was some alien from Mars, and that was even more annoying than when he was pulling his schoolmaster act. It wasn’t like they were there because they wanted—well, David wasn’t there because he wanted to be, anyway. They were there because Raúl had inherited this gigantic museum of a house and instead of being sane and selling it, he wanted to renovate it. But even he couldn’t do that by himself, so he was taking housemates and he needed them much more than they needed him. So he could stuff that uncomprehending stare up his slacks-clad ass. He couldn’t even show up in jeans like the rest of them.

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” Raúl said. He gestured vaguely behind himself. “I was looking at the fireplace in there. I think something’s made a nest in it and blocked it up. There are all these feathers at the bottom.”

“Well, it’s summer, so it’s not like we were going to be using it,” David muttered. He went around Silva and stalked past Raúl towards where he figured the kitchen was. “Come on already. If this isn’t going to work out, I’ve got to run to pay off my landlord for the month or he’ll throw my stuff on the curb again.”

* * *

Later, when they’d all had their walk-through with the house and had decided the kitchen wasn’t liable to explode when the stove was turned on, David dragged Fernando down to a coffeeshop for a recap and some ranting. Okay, mostly ranting. But he figured he was justified, seeing as—“And you don’t tell me till we’re in the car that it’s _González’s_ house? Why do I put up with you?”

“Because you’re a kind and forgiving person,” Fernando said, signaling for a waitress. He ordered a latte and a pastry, then flopped back in the booth to grin at David. “Also, you still owe me money.”

David rolled his eyes and let the motion carry his forehead down into the counter.

“David, for God’s sake, today was the first time you’d even had a conversation with Raúl. And it wasn’t that bad, was it? I keep telling you that he’s a lot different from what people say.” Fernando made his bench creak the squeaky, plastic creak of fake leather. “Which is all Hierro’s fault, frankly. Him and the PR people.”

He was probably giving the corner a dark look again, with those eyes of his smoldering and intense like some stupid telenovela star. Flexing his biceps as he sat there and thought all about what he’d do to those idiots wronging his poor Raúl and David was just going to keep smashing his head into the counter. It was cool and solid and this way he couldn’t punch Fernando for having incredibly bad taste. “You’re always defending him, you know.”

“Because…he and I have been friends for eight or so years? And we’ve cowritten a couple articles?” Bench creaking. Muffled conversation as the waitress brought Fernando his drink and food, stayed to flirt with those wispy bangs of his, and then the steadily fading click of her heels. “And he has a fantastic ass, too.”

“And you’re always telling me about his stupid _ass_ ,” David mumbled. He pushed his hands under his own ass. He couldn’t punch Fernando. He liked Fernando. He liked _Fernando’s_ ass, even if the other man was so stuck on Raúl that he still had no idea why a med student would take a class in 19th-century Spanish politics. And then make friends with the associate professor teaching it, and end up agreeing to share a house with him. Goddamn it, Fernando’s ass wasn’t that firm.

Yeah, David was going to keep telling himself that. And grinding his forehead into the counter.

Fernando laughed and grabbed David by the shoulder. He gave David a good shake, then tapped David on the back of the head when he realized he wasn’t getting David up that way. “Oh, you bring him up almost as much as I do. I’m looking forward to the day when you shake off your denial and admit you like him.”

David jerked up his head, ready to give Fernando a good tongue-lashing, but the other man was just grinning at him, lazy and brilliant, and David’s ire melted a little into simmering irritation. He jerked his head around to crack his neck, then slouched in his seat. “You don’t want me to like him, Morientes. If I liked him, you’d never get near him.”

“Not likely,” Fernando said genially, softening his patent disbelief. “But anyway, what’d you think of the house? You in on this?”

“It’s some piece of work,” David finally grunted. He shifted around, checking his phone when Fernando sipped his latte, got milky foam all over his upper lip and licked it off. Message from Silva, something about the body, but it didn’t seem like an emergency so David stuffed his mobile back into his jeans pocket. “And I’ve learned from hard experience that rent with utilities included _sounds_ great, but only if the utilities _work_.”

The slightest little bit of steel showed in Fernando’s eyes. Somehow it managed to overcome the fact that he was massacring his pastry and had flecks of golden crust all over his chin. “I told you, the rent’s low because we’re also helping to renovate the place. The plumbing works, there’ll be a new stove and fridge in before you move in, and like you said back there, it’s summer so we won’t need the heat.”

David refused to bend. “Just why are you so eager to get me and Silva in there? It’s not a bad location. It’s not like you’d have much of a problem finding housemates.”

After a moment, Fernando picked up his latte and took a big swig from it. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then looked at David over the latte, which was dangling carelessly between his index and thumb. “Villa, I’m just offering to you first because I like you and Silva’s a pretty steady kid for his age. If you don’t want to do it, just say so and I’ll shut up.”

* * *

Lips pressed tightly together, Silva awkwardly bent his arm round so he could use it to brush off the red bit that’d just hit him in the center of the forehead. He couldn’t use his hands because they were full of clamps and stuffed deep into the corpse’s chest cavity. “Well, that’s a relief. At least we don’t have to worry about going away for the holiday and coming back to find out our jerk landlord’s rerented our rooms again.”

Grunting, David squinted to see where the end of his forceps was going. He twisted it around, then tugged and quickly slashed at the last bit of membrane. “I thought you didn’t like the place,” he said, lifting the membrane away.

He dropped it into a bowl on top of the rest, then looked up to see Silva blinking rapidly. Then the other man shrugged and dropped his clamps, letting the cavity pull shut a bit as he consulted their manual. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, the whole time you looked like you were going to faint dead away if somebody breathed on you wrong.” David took advantage of the break to shuffle to the left and check out the next group’s corpse. It had much neater incisions than theirs—David grimaced and went back to poke at their body. He and Silva had done a better job of sectioning the abdominal organs, though, so maybe it’d even out. Stupid fucking curve and stupid fucking minimum GPAs for scholarships and stupid fucking everything. “You see a ghost or something?”

Silva made a funny little noise, like he was sucking his breath through his teeth. But when David looked up, Silva just stared back, annoyed. Then Silva ducked down and began rummaging around in their cart. “I thought you didn’t believe in that kind of crap.”

“I don’t. I’m teasing.” After a second, David cocked his head. “What, do _you_ believe in it?”

First came the hacksaw, and then came Silva, still irritated. But he wouldn’t look David directly in the eye as he gestured for David to get out of the way. “No. I was just kind of chilly. I think I’m coming down with a cold or something, with all the time I’ve been spending in the library. They keep it like a freezer over there.”

David h’mmmed and stepped back, taking the cart with him. He snagged the manual off it and carried it back to the dissection table, laying it by the corpse’s shoulder where Silva could look at it.

The other man finally glanced up, then smiled. “Thanks.” He went back to positioning himself over the corpse’s head. “But I thought it was okay. I mean, needs a lot of work, but it’s in better shape than I thought. I thought it was going to be another dump.”

“Yeah,” David muttered, tensing up. He knew Silva wasn’t blaming him but he couldn’t really help it, not when he’d been the one to promise their current place would be half-decent. Of course he’d been fooled too, but he was older and he should’ve been wiser. He’d had a while off before starting med school, whereas Silva had come fresh from the Canaries without a clue about how things worked.

Like he sensed David’s discomfort, or maybe like he was trying to talk himself into something, Silva began talking more loudly and insistently. “And we get our own bathrooms. Even if the plumbing doesn’t work and we’ve got to carry the water up in buckets, it’s still going to be great just to not have people walking in on you all the time.”

“You don’t mind that we’re sharing with two professors?” David asked.

Silva opened his mouth, then shook his head and lifted the hacksaw. A couple seconds passed and he put it down to look up at David. He seemed a little exasperated. “You having second thoughts, Guaje? Did you not like it?”

“No, it’s fine. I’m just wondering. If you don’t like it, you should say so. It’s not a big deal.” And just why would Raúl have a fucking mansion handy just when David was telling Fernando he couldn’t deal with his fucking landlord anymore? It was weird. It was—David grimaced and rolled his shoulders a couple times. He was tired and everything was cramping up—they’d been working for two hours already, trying to catch up with the others—and he needed to stop thinking about Raúl’s stupid flat stare. He’d already given Fernando an answer, after all.

“It’s fine,” Silva said slowly, drawing out the words like he was trying to make a point. But he didn’t say what the point was, just looked at David, and after a moment he didn’t even do that. He just sort of sighed and shook his head, bending back over the corpse. “Anyway, Professor Mor—I mean, Fernando seems pretty nice. He’s really laidback for a professor. And it’ll be kind of cool to live with Raúl.”

The snort just sort of got away from David.

Like he didn’t hear it, Silva gently settled the hacksaw’s teeth on the corpse’s face, most of it resting on the brow and nose. He made a couple finicky adjustments so the blade perfectly divided the face in two. “He’s not what I thought he’d be like either. He’s really quiet for a best-selling author, isn’t he?”

“Well, it’s not like he’s a _rich_ author yet, or he wouldn’t be taking housemates. Most of his earnings went to pay off his family’s debts, I heard.” David stared into the partly-dissected chest. “Besides, he only had that one. He hasn’t written anything big since.”

“Yeah, we all know you hate his kind of writing,” Silva said, affectionate and knowing. “You think move-in would be too early to ask if he’ll sign a copy for my mother? She adores him.”

David turned sharply, then shut his mouth hard on the nasty comment boiling up in him. He looked at the hacksaw that was pointed at his chest.

Then Silva snorted and began realigning the saw with the corpse’s head again. “Okay, I’ll stop. Hold the head still for me, would you? It’s going to be all crooked if it keeps wobbling.”

After a long moment, David swallowed hard and leaned over to cradle the head in his hands. The first stroke of the saw wasn’t that bad, since it was just skin, but then it began to grate on the bone and David made himself breathe slowly through his mouth. He wasn’t going to faint or anything silly like that, but sectioning a human skull wasn’t exactly his idea of a fun afternoon.

“So are we moving in with them?” Silva asked, briefly flicking his eyes up. Then he returned to concentrating hard on the saw, his whole upper body trembling slightly with the effort of keeping the blade straight. The tip of his tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

David blinked, then looked away, over Silva’s shoulder. Suddenly he had the feeling he’d made a horrible decision, and he wished to hell he could take it back.

He was being fucking stupid. “Yeah,” he said. “Monday.”

* * *

Monday was a fucking awful day. It started out raining and their goddamn landlord still hadn’t fixed the broken window by David’s bed, so he woke up wet. He got wetter when the bus to campus failed to see him, even though he was screaming and finally kicking pebbles at it, and just sloshed more water over him. When he finally did get to class, the professor decided to make an example of him, and since he had a part-time job at a coffeeshop that required him to wake up insanely early, Silva had already gotten a seat on the other side of the room and couldn’t feed David answers. And then they had to get back to their soon-to-be-old place and ignore the landlord’s railing about ungrateful little shits, like the bastard hadn’t tried to kill them via neglecting urgent repairs a thousand times over.

At least there wasn’t much to pack up, since neither David nor Silva had the money or the desire to accumulate useless crap. Their textbooks made up the bulk of the cartons sitting on the damp curb; it’d stopped raining around lunch, but it was so hot that that wasn’t much of a relief. Everything was still soggy and now it was steaming too, making David’s shirt unpleasantly sticky so he kept tugging at it. Finally he just yanked the damn thing off over his head.

“Whoo,” Silva said. He sounded surprised, but when a couple women hanging out the balcony of the house two down echoed him, he laughed. Smart kid that he was, he’d brought an iced coffee with him and was perched on a stack of boxes, sucking happily away at it. “Show ‘em med students aren’t all pasty nerds.”

David slanted his eyes at Silva, then rolled his eyes as he rubbed his shirt over the back of his neck and down to his chest. “No, we’re just perverted. What time is it? Fernando said he’d be here at quarter till.”

“Maybe he got stuck in class? I bet he’s got a line of girls waiting after every one to ask him questions.” But Silva obligingly tried to check his watch. His wrist was so skinny the thing slipped round as he turned his arm, and he finally had to stick his drink between his thighs to hold the watchface still. “And boys. And shirtless Asturians. He’s gotta be blind if he doesn’t take another look now.”

Snorting, David plopped down on the nearest box and began tossing his wadded-up shirt in his hands. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Any time,” Silva said, after a moment. He kind of mumbled it, not sounding so amused as before. But then he made a funny noise and jumped off his boxes, peering at something down the street. He frowned and put up a hand to shade his eyes, then lowered it to hook in the belt-loop of his jeans. “Is that…Raúl?”

It was. Driving up in a big white car that was a little more old-fashioned than David would’ve figured. Immaculately kept up, perfect paint job. It looked like a flashback in a movie, pulling slowly out of the heat shimmers to stop in front of them, and then Raúl got out and he was wearing a full suit, complete with his little perfect tie-knot. “Fernando had a faculty meeting he couldn’t get out of,” Raúl said over the roof of the car. “He says sorry, but he’ll be here in fifteen minutes so I can take the first load, and he can take whatever’s left.”

Silva nodded and dragged hard on his straw, then ducked in embarrassment when he abruptly ran out of coffee and horrendous slurping sounds filled the air. He turned around, took a couple steps and tossed his empty cup into a trashcan, then came back to stare at Raúl’s car. “You know, we can probably fit it all in yours.”

“Really?” Raúl rounded the front end of the car and looked at their things. “Is that it?”

David bit down hard on his first impulse. “Yeah. So?”

That earned him one of those blank looks from Raúl. Then something poked David hard in the side, and Silva walked by him to bend down by the boxes. “Yeah, we like to travel light,” Silva said, smiling up at Raúl. “It should all fit, if we can…can we put stuff in the backseat?”

“Sure,” Raúl said, blinking.

“It’s just, that’s a really nice car. I’m gonna try not to scratch up the…is that real leather in there?” Silva let go of the box and was plastered against the car’s back window before Raúl could reply. Or David could grab the kid and pull him aside and hiss that fucking leather seats were no big deal, for fuck’s sake. “Jesus, is this all vintage?”

Raúl blinked again, like he couldn’t manage those lashes of his by himself. Then he visibly relaxed and went up by David. He nudged the other man off his precious car before opening the back door. “Oh, no, more like eighty percent. It’d be nice if I could always replace with the same parts, but sometimes it’s just too expensive. I need it to run, too.”

“Well, it’s a car, you’d think that that’s what it does,” David muttered. Then he bent and grabbed a box just as Raúl turned around.

When he straightened up, Raúl had moved around to pop the trunk and Silva was staring at David like David had thrown a baby out a window or something. David took a step forward, sucking his breath through his teeth—he would grab the box with their made-of-lead textbooks—and Silva glanced at the box, then hurried up to get the other end. Then he leaned forward. “Can you just be nice till we’re there?” he hissed. “You just told our landlord to fuck himself and we don’t have anywhere to go if you piss off Raúl.”

“I know, I’m not stupid. I’m just—” David shut up as Raúl looked round the trunk’s lid.

Rolling his eyes, Silva started dragging them towards the trunk. He was pretty strong for his size so David could’ve only stopped it by letting go, and if David let go, the box would squish Silva. And David wasn’t an asshole.

Between the two of them, they got the box into the trunk without breaking any bones or scraping Raúl’s car. David rubbed his hands on his hips, trying to get out the crease the box’s edge had cut into them, while Silva shoved the box around, making space for the rest. Then David turned around for those, only to find himself staring at cardboard.

It moved past him, and with just a tiny little grunt, more of a courtesy than anything else, Raúl set the next box in the trunk. The man straightened up and wiped at some sweat running down the side of his head, then frowned. He sighed and took hold of his coat lapel, and suddenly he was taking off his coat and pulling his tie over his head. “God. It’s like a steam room out here,” he said under his breath. “You weren’t waiting around long, were you? Mori got…well, it sounded like he got kidnapped into the meeting, and he had to sneak out to call me.”

Even rolling up his sleeves. Somehow Raúl made it look utterly stagey, like a politician getting a photo-cop at a construction site. His shirt was still too crisp and white, showing off how perfectly golden his arms and neck were. “Yeah, well, it happens,” David snorted, turning away. “At least he remembered to call for help. Not a lot of people would.”

“You want me to put your stuff in the front seat?” Silva quickly asked. “Oh, wait a sec, that one’s really heav—”

Dressed-down Raúl picked it up in a clean jerk, then transferred it to the trunk as easily as he had his first. Beyond irritated now, David grabbed the bottom box in a stack of two, planted his feet, and heaved it up. His back and thighs whined, but it was only like a meter to the trunk. Where Raúl took off the top box, looking at David with that puzzled face like he didn’t know what species David was. He nodded to the other. “I don’t think that’s going to fit. It can go in the back, and we can put your laundry in here.”

“Fine,” David curtly said. Whatever the king wanted.

Raúl drew in a breath like he was going to say more, and David stopped, but then the other man just shook his head. He bent over the trunk, doing something. David got the box into the backseat before his back broke in two, then turned around for the next one.

They got things packed into the car in only a couple minutes, thanks to David settling for imagining he was packing up Raúl’s things so the other man could move to Antarctica. The other two must’ve helped, since boxes and bags disappeared faster than David was moving them, but David’s impression was that Raúl and Silva spent most of the time chatting about some book series. Since when did Silva like historical novels?

“All done,” Silva said, cracking his elbow. After swinging his arms a couple times, he walked around the car and then poked around on the sidewalk. “Okay, I don’t think we dropped anything either. Let’s go.”

“…oh. That’s a…I know. I know, Mori,” Raúl said, and David looked up. The other man had pulled out a mobile at some point and was furrowing his brow while shoving it against his ear. He half-turned, probably sensing David’s interest, and tugged at his hair. “All right, I’ll tell them. Are you going to make it out for dinner? I was going to cook. That sausage you really l—oh.” Disappointed face, like the world shouldn’t interfere with his desires. “All right. All right. I’ll see you later.”

Silva perked up. “Was that Fernando?”

“He’s still in that damn meeting.” Something else slipped out of Raúl, something a little dirty for his pretty perfect lips, and then he shrugged and went around to the driver’s door. “Well, I think you’ll both fit. I just hope no cop decides to pull us over.”

“Oh, if I see one, I’ll duck. I think I can fit in the footspace,” Silva said. He grinned at Raúl’s sudden stare. “Um, I’m a student and I don’t have a lot of money. It happens?”

After a moment, a smile slowly pulled over Raúl’s face. “I didn’t hear that. But at least it won’t be a long drive.”

“I can just squeeze in the back if you’re so worried about it,” David said. “It’s not like they feed us students much, if you can remember what it was like.”

Raúl stopped smiling. He shrugged diffidently, then pulled open his door. Sighing silently, Silva shook his head in disappointment and David ignored him. Sometimes Silva was just damn silly.

* * *

David couldn’t fit in the back. They tried about fifteen different ways to wedge him in, but nothing got all the body parts inside and finally he had to let Silva pull him aside and say it was okay, it wouldn’t be for that long. And they all got into the front, with Silva practically straddling the gear-shift.

It wasn’t as bad a squeeze as David had feared, but of course that was because Raúl drove a giant museum-piece. When nothing else was in it, Raúl must look like a pea rattling around in a coconut. But David was grateful for the space; it meant he didn’t have to touch any part of Raúl, and if Silva wanted to babble away to the other man about books and football, he could do that just fine while David pretended to stare out the window. Goddamn it, Silva knew how he felt about Raúl and Fernando—he’d sat for as many of David’s rants as David had sat for Fernando’s ridiculous rhapsodizing on Raúl’s various virtues. It was like Silva was _trying_ to short out David’s temper, and when David had thought they were pretty good friends.

“Shit!” Raúl hissed suddenly, the rough guttural swear-word a cutting contrast to his cultured rambling.

The car screeched to a stop, then rocked ominously as the boxes in the back tried to keep moving forward. They didn’t manage it, but for a moment it was damn uncomfortable, with things sliding around and Silva eeping as he fell onto Raúl, and David scrambling not to tilt that way, too.

Outside, an old man hobbled frantically across the road, oblivious to his near-escape from death. Waving her arms furiously, an old woman chased him.

David’s nose smooshed into Silva’s hip. Ass. Somewhere around there—David wasn’t looking too closely since he wasn’t entirely sure his nose was still intact. He grabbed at something that gave, heard Raúl exclaim something and hurriedly let it go, only to sit up and find out it’d been Silva’s arm. Silva was still all flopped over Raúl’s lap, his arms awkwardly bent back to try and get a handhold on something, and Raúl was just staring down at Silva.

The man was fucking useless outside of his little rarefied ivory tower. David got hold of Silva’s arm again and yanked up, then down when he saw Silva’s eyes. “You all right?”

“Yeah—yeah,” Silva said shakily. He grabbed his neck and massaged it a bit, glancing at David. Then he abruptly turned around and gave Raúl a concerned look. “I’m really sorry. Are you okay? That was kind of—”

“Well, it wasn’t like you could help it,” Raúl said, doing his blinking thing again. Somebody honked them and he winced, then pressed his lips together and set his shoulders. He put the car back into gear and started it sedately across the crossing. “I’m fine. I don’t think you hurt anything, er…”

“Important?” Silva scrunched down between David and Raúl, his hand now scruffing nervously at his head. He was flushing. “Um, good. ‘cause I thought I pretty much missed it all, but um…yeah. Okay.”

The corners of Raúl’s mouth pulled up. Then he looked over, trying to see if the next lane over was clear, and caught sight of David. He sensibly stopped that stupid smug smile and just nodded. “It’s about two more minutes, and then we’ll be there.”

“Can’t wait,” David muttered.

* * *

Move-in went a lot better. The house was big enough so that they could have their own bedrooms, if one didn’t mind using the term loosely since they were all temporarily on the first floor and only Raúl and Fernando had actual mattresses. Still, an airbed could be comfortable when rain wasn’t coming in through the damn window and that was the first thing David checked when picking his room.

The second thing was where Fernando’s stuff was, while cursing himself for a fool the entire time. And then David cursed some more when he recognized Fernando’s gym bag lying on the floor next to a stack of suit-jackets that had to be Raúl’s. There were two mattresses, and they were separated: the room must’ve been a dining room or something, with the smaller offshoot being a servant’s closet—excuse David, bedroom—and that was where most of Fernando’s things were. But the only way to get to Fernando’s room was through Raúl’s room, and wasn’t that just cute.

“Why are you here?” somebody said behind David. Kind of whispery.

David snorted and shook off a chilly draft that blew up against him. “Just seeing where everything is in case of a fire, Raúl. Don’t get all knotted up.”

“What?” When David turned around, Raúl was just walking into the room. The other man stopped and looked quizzically at David. “Are you looking for something?”

But he’d just…great, now David was having fucking imaginary conversations with Raúl when the man wasn’t even around. “Not really. So you’re over here?”

“Yes,” Raúl said after a moment. The way his mouth was all pursed up, he was dying to say something else but he had to be all restrained and proper. He looked around David, then stepped forward to look through the bathroom to the next room over. “Are you taking that one?”

“Yeah. It’s got a nice view.” The windows were still boarded up, which was why they weren’t leaky.

Raúl gave David one of those slow, considering looks, like he knew exactly what was going on. Not that he had the balls to call David on it. “You don’t want to be across the way with Silva? Then you’re not sharing the bath with Fernando and me.”

“No, Silva’s all excited about having his own shower for once. He deserves it.” David shrugged his shoulder. “And I can share.”

“Well,” Raúl said. He paused, then turned around and walked out of the room.

For a moment David just stared after him in sheer disbelief. Then he snorted, shaking his head, and went back to his room. That was—that was almost impressive, with how snobby it was. It almost made David like the other man.

* * *

The first night, Raúl cooked. David hated to admit it, but the man did that pretty well. Anyway, Silva burbled enough compliments for the both of them, till even Raúl was embarrassed. Of course, then Raúl fucked it up by commenting that Silva and David ate like they’d been starving themselves. He was a professor and he knew when the damn tuition was due.

Fernando changed the subject to dividing up the chores. They would split grocery-buying, but other than that, they couldn’t really agree on who could do what because nobody’s schedule matched up. Finally Silva suggested they just do a sign-up sheet, and for the big things like replacing the rotten steps in the staircase, wait till the weekend. It sounded fair enough, even though David wanted to point out that Raúl had paid vacation time and they as students didn’t.

After dinner, Silva bounded off to his room, saying something about studying anatomy. Raúl hung around for a while, fussing with the dishes and staring weirdly at David, but finally he fucked off to his room to arrange his shoes or something. That left Fernando and David to finish unpacking the dishes and silverware for their share of the night’s chores.

“Oh, I don’t even remember buying this one,” Fernando said, turning an ugly orange platter about in his hands. He looked at the stack of platters already on the counter, then back at his platter. “Maybe I should just junk it.”

“It’s not like we’re in dire need of them, unless you were planning to cater to some clowns.” David grinned when Fernando laughed, his irritation briefly fading. Of course, then he looked down into the box at his feet, which was filled with gravy boats and dinky little bowls and all kinds of stupid little dishes. All Raúl’s. It was like the man had been about to get married, then got dumped and stuck with all the gifts. “Where the hell do these go?”

Fernando stopped looking disgusted at his platter and leaned over David to peer into the box. Supposedly the air-con worked but so far David had only felt it around the bedrooms. Night had fallen but it was still sticky and hot, and Fernando’s shadow on David’s back didn’t make things cooler. Actually, it had the opposite effect, like Fernando had just bent real close and _breathed_ all down David’s spine.

“Um, ask Raúl when he gets back. I don’t think we’re going to use them soon so we can probably stuff them on a high shelf, but they’re his, so…” That extra layer of heat moved away, and a moment later there was a slight clatter as Fernando put down his platter. He started opening and closing cabinets. “David. You’re not making a face just because you’ve got to talk to Raúl, are you?”

David just started taking dishes out of the box.

“All right, usually I’m too amused for my own good, but honestly, David. You just moved into the same house as the man. Why on earth would you do that if you can’t even ask him a straightforward question?” Fernando sighed.

Why’d David move in? Why’d he _move in_? Mary, mother of God, but sometimes Fernando was as dense as he was handsome. For a couple seconds David seriously contemplated banging his head into all those damn soup bowls and taking care of both his exasperation and the asking-Raúl issue in one go.

Something thudded heavily above him.

David jerked up his head, half-expecting to see Fernando staring angrily back at him, after having slammed a cupboard door shut or something. But Fernando wasn’t looking at him—Fernando was looking at the ceiling, puzzled and startled. And that sound hadn’t been sharp enough to have come from the kitchen; it was more like somebody or something falling on the second floor.

“I thought we agreed not to go up there till we fixed the steps,” Fernando suddenly muttered. He raked one hand through his hair, gorgeously exasperated, and then turned on his heel and walked out. “Raúl? If the floorboard breaks and you put your leg through it, you’re going to make me miss my…Raúl.”

Fernando stopped so sharply that his feet skidded on the wooden floor and he had to grab at the jamb. Then he backed up, letting David see Raúl’s confused face.

“What?” Raúl said. He didn’t have much of a repertoire of responses. “Were you calling me?”

“I—we heard something upstairs,” Fernando replied after a moment. He leaned against the doorway, frowning with one arm crossing his chest. “I thought maybe it was you.”

Raúl looked even more puzzled, which frankly, made David wonder where all that famed intellect went after working hours. It was a weird noise upstairs, not rocket science. “But we tried the steps, and some of them felt loose so we all said we weren’t going up till those were fixed. So I wasn’t…”

As his voice trailed off, Raúl slowly turned his head at the same time that Fernando was twisting on the ball of his foot. Their gazes swept into each other, aligned, and David was two seconds away from throwing a gravy boat at that idiotic tinkling in the air.

Besides, both men looked dead serious. And it only lasted for a second. And that tinkling was in David’s head, wasn’t it, and David didn’t want to think about that and thankfully Fernando moved so he could stare at the other man instead. “Where’s that oversized ladle of yours?” Fernando asked over a shoulder, banging through cupboards again. “You know, the one the size of a—”

“That was my grandmother’s!” Raúl hissed, rearing up with huge scandalized eyes. Then he shouldered Fernando aside and reached under the sink. “And it’s pure silver and it’d crumple. Here.”

He handed Fernando a cast-iron frying pan. Right about then, David finally got with their bizarre telepathy and scrambled up himself, looking quickly about the kitchen. His eyes fell on a broom in the corner and he grabbed it, then slid after Fernando just in time to cut between him and Raúl. “If it’s a burglar, then what’s he got to steal? I thought you said nothing was left up there.”

“I know, but it might be some teenager breaking in for a dare. The house has a…a little bit of a reputation,” Raúl said tightly. When he figured out that his dagger-looks weren’t going to make David move over, he made a sigh-face without actually sighing and reluctantly tagged along beside Fernando. Then he looked over his shoulder. “Shouldn’t somebody go see if Silva’s all right?”

“You go. It’s not like you have anything in case it is somebody up there,” David retorted.

Fernando looked sharply over his shoulder, but before he could say something, Raúl shook his head and slipped behind them to head towards Silva’s room. The man was all suffering, seriously. “All right. Watch your step, please.”

“It’s not a fucking museum,” David muttered.

“David—” But then Fernando just rolled his eyes. He set his shoulders back and walked faster so David had to hop to catch up. “You’re such a bastard sometimes, you know.”

It stung. People had been telling David that for most of his life and generally he didn’t give a shit because he was what he was, and to hell with them for not thinking about what it was like to be in his shoes for a couple hours. But coming from Fernando, even casual and meaningless like that, like brushing off a fly, it stung.

Not that it stopped him from following Fernando up the stairs, or from stiffening up when one board creaked violently under Fernando’s foot. Fernando stopped, then shifted the frying pan to his other hand and used his free one to hang onto the railing, as if that was any less rickety. David just tried to put his feet as close to the steps’ ends as he could, figuring that if they gave way, he’d have an extra second to…to…to tell himself that checking out Fernando’s ass when he was wounded and bitter and also possibly having a home invasion was _such_ a stupid thing to do.

Despite all that, they made it to the top of the stairs in one piece. Fernando eased himself onto the second floor, swiveling his head from side to side. Then he appeared to step back and David swung the broom around, squinting hard into the dark.

“Damn it, I should’ve grabbed the flashlight,” Fernando said. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Well, you hear anyth—”

“What?” came a muffled but still far-too-loud shout. Then running, and even louder, another, slightly more breathless shout. “Guaje! Guaje? You all right? Fernando?”

“Shhhh!” Raúl hissed, like that was going to help. They might as well just do a little song and dance for the robbers. Burglars. Whatever.

Fernando might’ve hefted the frying pan, like he was thinking the same thing. Then he snorted and took a deep breath. He turned to face the nearest room. “Hey! If someone’s there, then get out! Or I’ll come after you, and I can hurt you worse than you can hurt me.”

The second part actually sounded much more intimidating than the first, even though Fernando didn’t yell it out. Something about the way Fernando straightened up and how his voice deepened.

Nobody said anything after that. They just stood there, Raúl and Silva below, and David two steps behind Fernando. The house was completely silent.

David’s fingers were sweaty and slipped a bit on the railing. He looked down to push them back, then looked up and inhaled. Something had moved up in front of Fernando.

“Nothing,” Fernando said almost in the same moment. He turned around and went onto the first step, and David had a clear view of the landing behind the other man. Like Fernando had just said, nothing. “Well, it’s an old house. Probably it was just settling.”

He went down past David, then stopped and coughed politely. After another hard look at the empty landing, David shrugged and turned to follow the other man down. The thing had been big, but it’d also been dark and shadowy. In a dark and shadowy area. Nothing.

* * *

Around two o’clock that night, David woke up and couldn’t figure out why. Then he heard another thump on the second floor and just rolled over, stifling his grumbling in his pillow. It was an old house, and much as he’d like to complain, he had agreed to live in the damn thing.

He closed his eyes, but didn’t fall immediately back asleep like usual; with his schedule, a chance to get some rest wasn’t to be wasted, ever. David tossed and turned for a bit before finally flopping face-first into the mattress. He scrunched his eyes shut and tried to concentrate on sleeping.

Instead he gradually became aware of soft noises coming from somewhere nearby. Next door. Raúl’s bedroom. It was kind of like a whispered conversation, which David grudgingly supposed was better than a bunch of creaking and moaning. But for fuck’s sake.

He thought about yelling at them, but Fernando calling him a bastard suddenly flashed through his mind. So David grimaced, smushed his face deeper into his pillow, and just tried not to listen. Eventually it worked and he fell asleep again.

* * *

The next day David had a morning class but Silva didn’t. Fernando should’ve been up early too, but David didn’t see him when he walked into the kitchen. There just was Raúl sitting at the table, rubbing his eyes over his breakfast. Then jumping and jerking up his head to look at David as if he’d forgotten he was sharing with three other men. When Raúl wasn’t being prissy, it seemed like he was having problems with his nerves.

“Oh,” Raúl said, relaxing. “Oh, it’s you.”

David didn’t even bother answering that. He just served himself up some food from the stove and ate standing at the counter.

It wasn’t like Raúl seemed interested in a conversation either, anyway. When David finally looked at him, he’d gone back to eating. Well, picking at his food. He’d cooked up plenty but he didn’t seem to have an appetite, just nibbling here and there. Occasionally he’d stop and push his fingers into the flesh below his eyes, which was dark and swollen as if he’d been up all night chatting away.

“Working late?” said David’s mouth before he could help himself.

Raúl started again. He looked up at David, then off to the side. Then he shook his head and put up his elbow on the table so he could rub at the side of his face. “No. I just…I didn’t sleep that well. I was thinking I’d call for someone to look at the air-conditioning this week.”

“I thought we were doing the floors first. Since you can make do with fans, but it’s hard to get around breaking a leg by falling through a board,” David remarked. He paused, hearing some kind of beeping, but just realized that that was Silva’s alarm—the poor kid had forgotten to set it later. Sure enough, a couple seconds later the beeping abruptly stopped and something crashed.

Jumpy Raúl twitched again, then got halfway out of his seat before he noticed David. He stopped and looked at David like he deserved an answer.

He didn’t, but it was early and David was only halfway through his first cup of coffee, so David’s usual irritation wasn’t quite there yet. “That’s just Silva, killing his alarm clock. What, you think it was another burglar?”

After a moment, Raúl shrugged and sat back down, like it didn’t matter. But his face, the way it was tightly embarrassed, said that that had been exactly what he’d thought. He picked up his fork and pushed some food around. “We can still do the floors this weekend. But my room was freezing last night, and also there…” he hesitated, then looked sharply up at David “…what about yours? Weren’t you cold?”

“Not really. It was a warm night.” David drained the rest of his coffee, then mounded up the remainder of his breakfast so he could scoop the last bits more easily with his fork. “Well, whatever. It’s your house.”

Raúl grunted, his chatty mood apparently over. He played with his food while David finished eating, then began washing his dishes. Then Raúl made this weird little determined noise and abruptly rose, grabbing his plate. He walked over to the trashcan and dumped it all in there, then came to the sink and grabbed the sponge David had put down just so he could rack up his plate. He scrubbed away for a good minute before blinking and glancing at David. “Sorry, were you done?”

“No,” David said curtly. He stared at Raúl till Raúl gave the sponge back, then gave his mug a good once-over. “You always this out of it in the morning?”

“I’m sorry,” Raúl muttered. And stood there, awkwardly, fiddling with his soapy plate. He kept grimacing. “I had a bad night’s sleep.”

Obviously Raúl didn’t mean the apology, but it was so weird it stopped David for a moment. And with the repeating, and the grimacing, and Raúl just looked like he was some worn-out guy trying to work himself up to facing the day. It was just…

“So where’s Fernando?” David asked, turning around. After running the mug under the tap, he moved over to let Raúl do his dishes.

“Mori? Oh, he went jogging. He always does that in the morning,” Raúl said absentmindedly. A soap bubble somehow flicked up into his face and he flinched, then did some amusing contortions in trying to wipe it off on his shoulder. “He slept fine, I think. Same as always.”

Not that David had asked for the man’s opinion, but he supposed since it was about Fernando, he wasn’t going to bitch about it. And anyway, a couple minutes later Fernando rattled in the backdoor, his tee-shirt completely stuck to him with sweat and his shorts riding up on one side. It got a lot easier to deal with Raúl then.

Plus Silva wandered in. He was yawning and even if he couldn’t fall back asleep, he was still so drowsy he got Raúl clucking over him for nearly using salt where he’d meant to use sugar. It got them out of the way…kind of funny how Silva had suddenly developed this thing for doing that with Raúl. Up till now he’d always seemed kind of noncommittal about Raúl, not listening to David’s complaints and not seeming to mind, but not really agreeing either.

“…ride to campus?”

“Huh?” David dragged himself back to the outline of Fernando’s pecs under thin white cotton—to Fernando. Shit. The other man was already smirking at him. “Oh, yeah. That’d be great, thanks.”

Raúl had heard, and tossed off something about Fernando not missing his mail or whatever, but oddly enough, just left it at that. He grunted when Fernando said he knew and he’d make it, and went back to talking to whatever he and Silva were talking about. It seemed to involve a lot of hair-rumpling by Raúl, and weird craning by Silva as he tried to see something in Raúl’s face. He even reached out and poked at Raúl’s eyebags.

“You can tell the caffeine’s not running through your…” Fernando started, all amused, and then he turned to see what David was trying not to look at. His stance changed, his shoulder going up slightly and his back straightening. “You look like you could use a liter yourself. You want me to drop a cup in your office? It’s on my way.”

That was to Raúl, who did his blinking thing again. Silva looked confused as well, kind of a deer-in-headlights expression.

“Oh, no. That’s fine. I’ll—” Raúl swallowed kind of hard, like he was being made to do something, but then put a lot of determination into his voice “—actually, I’m going to stay here and work today. I don’t have any meetings and I need to get that draft done.”

“I don’t have class till noon. I can try looking through the boxes and find the coffeemaker, so at least we’re not stuck with this crappy instant stuff,” Silva suggested.

For a moment, Fernando looked like he was going to object. To be honest, David wanted to object, but he couldn’t figure out why and that kept him from making a fool of himself, thank God.

“Oh, thanks.” Raúl smiled at Silva, then turned around and went out of the kitchen.

And Silva just bounced over to take the seat Raúl had left, digging into his breakfast with absolutely no sign that he’d meant that as anything but a nice gesture. Just offering to find a coffeemaker. Munching happily on his food. “Man, Raúl’s a great cook,” he mumbled through a mouthful. “Hey, Guaje, you want to hit the library in the afternoon? We’ve got that exam coming up.”

“Okay. Yeah, sure,” David said, first slow and then a bit too fast to cover up. “I’ll call you around three.”

“Just give me ten minutes to shower and change, and we can drive up.” Fernando sounded back to normal too, his usual annoyingly nice and oblivious self. He ambled past David, smelling like sweat and grass and tar.

Silva looked up as Fernando passed him, and for some reason Silva looked angry about it. But David wasn’t really watching Silva head-on, and when he did, he saw narrowed eyes but because Silva was still in that half-dozy mode. It wasn’t like Silva showed any other signs of irritation, with the way he promptly started talking about their study plans, so David just chalked it up to the less than ideal night’s sleep _he’d_ had.

* * *

Silva put his face into his book and laid there for several seconds, one arm folded over his head and the other stretched despairingly outwards. A low, heartrending moan came from him. “I’m gonna _fail_ , Guaje.”

“No, you’re not.” David sat up, trying to work out that kink in his back, then settled for slouching in a slightly different position in his seat. He didn’t sound that convincing. Well, he wanted to, because Silva was too good to get beat up by one stupid exam, but it was a little hard to be peppy when David was thinking he was going to bomb as well. He didn’t think that real often and he wasn’t used to it, and it was just a weird, nasty, dumb feeling. “Fuck. The more I try to remember things, the more I feel like I’m forgetting them. Oh, fuck this. I think we need a break.”

Grunt from Silva. His fingers twitched a little.

The damn book was heavy so David tossed it onto the table, on top of their zillion other heavy textbooks. “Say something that doesn’t have to do with med school.”

“Um.” Silva turned his head so he was resting on his cheek instead of his nose. He stabbed the eraser-end of his pencil into his book. “I think the house is infested with squirrels. Or some animal.”

After a moment, David scrunched down so he could rest his head on the back of his chair. “What?”

“You know, the thumping. There was some more last night. Woke me up. And I heard this weird scratchy noise too,” Silva mumbled. He scratched his nose with his pencil, then tossed it away and just used his nails. Then he sighed and pried himself off his book, looking blearily at David. “And Raúl said he couldn’t sleep either.”

“Yeah, seems like he told everybody.” Maybe that was what that whole talk had been about, just Raúl bitching about his insomnia. Sometimes Silva was too polite for his own good.

“He said it wasn’t thumping, though. He said he thought he heard somebody talking. But Fernando was asleep, and you were asleep too, right?” For some reason Silva tilted his head and arched his eyebrows. Then he grinned and rocked back in his chair, all but daring David to be pissed off at him. “You weren’t like, trying to spook poor Raúl. Were you?”

David looked at the books scattered across the table. The big, heavy books. Then he looked at Silva’s teasing grin and just sighed. “You know, I might not be a hypocrite like everybody else, but I have standards. I’m not going to stoop to shit like that. He probably just had a nightmare. Though God knows what the hell he’d have a nightmare about, with the way everybody babies him.”

Silva laughed outright, so hard that he actually started to slip out of his chair. He caught himself and straightened up, then reached for his water bottle. “Oh, come on, be nice.”

“Why?” David snapped. “Why the _hell_ should I be nice to him? He’s the one who wants to renovate that damn house, so if it doesn’t suit him it’s his fault.”

The grin abruptly dropped off Silva’s face, and his head fell as well. He took his bottle off the table and fiddled with it, his shoulders hunching over so he looked painfully small. Part of David’s gut twisted a little; maybe that had been sharp of him. But then, it wasn’t like Silva didn’t know how David felt about Raúl, and David honestly didn’t have an obligation to _be nice_. To anybody.

“It really did seem to bother him, actually,” Silva said after a long, awkward silence. Quieter, more serious. “But he wouldn’t give me details, just that he kept thinking he heard voices. And I know that you don’t like him because of Fernando, but I don’t think that means Raúl deserves to have bad dreams. You remember last semester I barely slept a whole month because I kept having that nightmare about losing my scholarship, and it _sucked_. I wouldn’t want anybody to have that problem.”

“Well, you’re a good person,” David told him, and didn’t hesitate about it. That was just the plain truth.

Silva eased up his gaze, like he was still worried David would bite off his head. But when he saw David was serious, he smiled and relaxed. “I just kind of feel bad for him, because he really is looking forward to working on the house, you know. It’s like a childhood dream of his, and then the first night he sleeps there, he…well, can’t sleep.”

As if that was the worst thing that could happen to a person. And if they wanted to talk about spoiled childhood dreams…but David swallowed that, and instead reached for his notes. Cramming for the fucking exam was bad enough without picking a fight with Silva, too. “They do make pills for that kind of problem. It’s not like he can’t afford them, either.”

“Oh, you’re hopeless,” Silva said, back to fond exasperation. “Oh, well. Pity we aren’t studying that, anyway. Just this useless stuff.”

“Yeah,” David sighed. He flipped a couple pages in his notebook. “Where were we?”

* * *

Since Silva was pulling a late shift at the coffeeshop, David took their books back to the house. They’d skipped dinner trying to puzzle out their instructor’s old exams and so he was starving, his stomach feeling like it wanted to gnaw through his spine and out his back. But when he got to the house, nobody else was there. He knew Fernando had some evening dinner he had to go to; he didn’t know where Raúl was and frankly, didn’t care.

So David cooked himself up a quick mess, with more than enough left over for Silva when he got back. He was a pretty damn good cook himself, and actually he could make good money that way, if it wasn’t for the fact that every damn restauranteur in town seemed determined to buy the cheapest shit possible and then blame the help when the customers threw up dinner. A couple of weeks before Fernando had come with his offer of a house-share, David had lost his job at a local seafood joint and had been too hammered with classes and keeping an eye on his scumbag landlord to do interviews for a new one. But he really should get onto that now, or else even with the lower rent, his bank account wasn’t going to make it.

Wasn’t going to be hard, David thought as he approvingly tasted his food. Then he winced as his ravenous stomach responded to that morsel with a huge growl that went on and on and on, like it was trying to impress somebody. He hurriedly dished himself up a bowl, turned off the stove, and headed for his room to keep studying.

About a half-hour into that, stomach full and its ache now transferred to his head, David thought pointedly to himself that he hadn’t heard a single weird thump or whisper. It was all just a bunch of crap, after all.

Something groaned. It was a long, low sound, with a barely audible metallic undertone, exactly like a squeaky door hinge in a distant room. But it didn’t sound like the front door, and anyway, David hadn’t heard any cars pulling up.

David started to listen harder, then shook his head and picked up his textbook. But the noise came again and as much as he knew it was nothing, he couldn’t just sit there. He shoved a piece of paper into his book to mark the place, then went out to take a look.

Whatever it’d been, it’d definitely come from somewhere on the first floor, and all of that was safe to walk around so David did exactly that. He checked every room and didn’t find anything out of place—didn’t find _anyone_ either. So David went back to his room.

And stopped just outside, frowning. The door was shut. He didn’t think he’d closed it when he’d left—his memory flashed to him just stalking out, too irritated by the interruption—but it wasn’t like he’d looked back.

After a moment, David tried the knob. It turned freely, and when he pulled on it, all that was revealed was his airbed, a few unpacked boxes of his stuff, his laundry bag in the corner. He’d probably…David paused, halfway through the doorway. He turned back and pushed the door out, then let go and watched it.

The door swung forward a few more centimeters, moving more and more slowly till it finally was still. Then, like a creeping snail, it began swinging back.

David stopped it with his fingertips and leaned over to take a good look at the hinges. The pin on the middle one was half-out, and he could twist the top one around pretty easily as well. Rolling his eyes, David let go of the door and got his trashcan. He brought that back, propped the door open so he’d get some air—he couldn’t open his windows and otherwise the room was stuffy as Raúl’s suits—and then went back to studying.

* * *

A friend recommended David try asking at an Andalusian restaurant, but when he was doing his trial on the line, one of the other line cooks tried to pour cream down his jeans. Typical hazing, and the typical response, so far as David’s experience had been, was to catch them first, smack them good and then forget about it. Except that line cook was apparently the owner’s little brother, and the owner came in just as David was punching the prick. So no job yet.

Raúl had people in to look at the air-con and they just found that the vents were clogged up, like you’d figure with a house nobody had really lived in for years. Except _something_ happened when one guy was working in the basement and he came up white and screaming, and wouldn’t go back down. He wouldn’t say what but he sure as hell talked his friends into leaving—even returned some of Raúl’s money and that _never_ happened in Spain. That also left them to DIY the rest of the vents and so David got covered in so much fucking dust he woke up tasting the shit. And just because, David took the basement vents with Fernando. _They_ didn’t see a damn thing.

Well, that wasn’t true. David did see a lot of Fernando in nothing but jeans and another one of those tight cotton tees, which by the end was covered in black streaks of grease. So was Fernando’s skin. The shit smelled like…well, like shit, and needed soaking in dish detergent to get off, but Fernando made it look fucking good. Of course, then he went and soaked his hands in a tub at the kitchen table while Raúl did the scrubbing, and they chatted about work and told insider jokes and it was all cozy and David went to bang his head into a wall. The weird thumps hadn’t come back, so he figured he’d make up for that. 

No, actually David studied some more. And then David and Silva had their exam. It sucked. It sucked so much they promptly went out with the rest of their classmates and got drunk, except David didn’t because the moment they got there, Silva sucked down a pitcher of beer and turned into a crazy little thing who kept sticking out his tongue and telling people he could balance a golf ball on it. For a half-hour. Then Silva flopped over, and David carried him home.

Literally. The nearest bus stop was still a block and a half from the house, and Silva was just awake enough to insist on piggybacking. “Better than walking,” Silva slurred in David’s ear. His hands restlessly clutched in the front of David’s shirt. “C’mon, I walk right now, I’d totally fall into something. Like Raúl’s lap.”

David gritted his teeth, then made himself take a deep breath. He took a better grip on Silva’s legs and hiked up the other man. “Raúl’s not even here.”

“I know, but I fell! In his lap! Right on his balls!” Silva was a disgustingly chirpy drunk. Except that his giggle was kind of charming, and it was hard to be disgusted at a kid who would be red as a tomato when he was sober and remembering he couldn’t stop sniffing David’s hair. “It was a pretty good handful, by the way.”

On the other hand, David could just toss the kid over a shoulder. Then Silva’s mouth would be down in David’s back and David probably could ignore him better.

“I know you hate him, Guaje, but you know what?” More sniffing, and then a funny little contented sigh. “He’s _cute_.”

“He is not. He’s an uptight over-hyped prick,” David muttered.

Silva laughed and unwound one arm from David’s neck to scruff David’s hair. When Silva was sober, David was going to kill him. “Yeah, he’s a prick,” Silva said, his voice dropping to conspiratorial. “Also, he has nice eyes, and nice hair, and hey, if he’s bothering me, he’s not with Mori, right?”

“He’s bothering you?” David felt his voice break, it rose so quickly. He actually stopped on the sidewalk. “When?”

“Oh, Guaje, you’re so fucking over-protective. If he’s a jerk to me I can drop-kick him like I drop-kicked that asshole Argentine. What’s his name. Burdisso.” His arm firmly back around David’s neck, Silva wriggled his way up David’s back by way of clamping his knees around David’s so hard David couldn’t breathe for a second. The kid was pretty strong for his size, and not dumb. Unless he was drunk. Then he was a complete moron, unfortunately. “Anyway, it’s no big deal. It’s just, I come in late at night, or wake up early ‘cause of work, right? And he’s always up. I think he’s still having problems sleeping. So we talk. ‘cause I’m a nice person. You said so.”

David bit back a sigh and started trudging along again. At least they were only a couple meters from the house—damn, Raúl’s car was in the drive, and Fernando’s wasn’t. Well, if Raúl got that judging look on his face, David would just dump Silva on the other man’s back and see if he could deal with a squirmy little drunk who…who would not stop messing with David’s hair. For fuck’s sake.

“You did mean it right, Guaje?” Silva asked, his voice suddenly wobbly. He prodded David’s head with his nose. “’cause you know, what you think, I know. I mean, I want to know. It means…it means…it’s important. I like you.”

“Yeah, I meant it. Even if you’re a pain in the ass sometimes,” David said, walking up the front path. Silva’s weight suddenly shifted, skewing them left so David was looking at the side of the house, and David saw somebody pass in front of one of the few unboarded windows: Raúl’s bedroom, of course. Then he hefted Silva back into place and walked up to the door, giving it a good kick. If Raúl was in, David wasn’t going to chance letting Silva down to get at his keys. “You’re a good kid.”

“ _Kid_ ,” Silva repeated, kind of hard. He started to say something else, but suddenly made a funny lurching cough. His right hand jerked off David’s chest. “Um.”

David tried not to swear as he kicked the door again. “Fucking Raúl, fucking come on. Don’t fucking—”

The door swung open. Raúl stood there, spatula in hand, blinking as usual. He was always fucking blinking. “What…”

And the ‘what.’ For the sake of—David didn’t have the time. “Move,” he snapped, shouldering the other man out of the way.

Silva hiccupped again and David broke into a jog. He skidded around a corner, smacked his knee into the jamb but he got Silva into the bathroom and, more importantly, off him before Silva suddenly hacked up in his throat and puked out a long brown stream into the toilet. Repeat two times, so hard that David grabbed one of Silva’s shoulders to steady him, and then Silva put his head down on the toilet rim and groaned pitifully. “Shit. I really shouldn’t have had those tapas.”

More like, that fucking pitcher of beer, but the face Silva turned up at David had vomit smeared around the mouth and grey skin and big washed-out eyes, and so David just handed the kid some toilet paper. “You okay now?”

“I need to lie down,” Silva mumbled, wiping his face. He tossed the soiled paper into the toilet, then put his head back down on the rim.

David gave the kid a moment to settle his stomach, then bent down and got Silva by the waist. The moan Silva let out made David’s gut do that twist again, but lying down on the toilet was not the way to go and Silva would thank him later. He ignored the kid and levered Silva onto his feet, then towards the door.

It would’ve been out the door, but Raúl was blocking the way. The only reason David didn’t let him have an earful was that the other man was holding a glass of water, and Silva really needed that.

“Was it your exam?” Raúl asked, holding out the glass.

Before David could answer, Silva flopped up his head and squinted at Raúl. “Oh, um…” his eyes found the water and he snatched at it, then looked embarrassed “…yeah. It sucked.”

“Oh,” Raúl said. And then he stood there while David turned Silva around to face the sink and had Silva rinse out his mouth, brush his teeth, all that.

He finally moved when David swiveled Silva, who was listing over so his head was aimed directly at Raúl’s gut, towards the door. Raúl let David get Silva out of there, then went into the bathroom. Probably his moment of humanity was over, and he was going to freak out over the puke in his precious house’s toilet or something like that.

By the time David got Silva to Silva’s bedroom, the kid was on the verge of passing out. Sleep was the best cure anyway, so David just checked to make sure Silva wasn’t actually dropping into a coma. Then he tossed a blanket over Silva and went out to get himself the food and drink he hadn’t had time to get, seeing that he’d had his hands full with keeping Silva out of trouble.

Predictably enough, Raúl was in the kitchen, poking at a pan on the stove with his spatula. When he saw David, he nodded towards the pan and then stepped away, leaving the spatula behind. “Help yourself.”

Just out of principle David wanted to say no, but his stomach wasn’t having it; the food smelled fucking delicious. Fucking perfect Raúl.

David got himself a bowl and served himself as Raúl wandered around the kitchen, putting away that and checking this. It did look as if the man had been cooking for a while; he had enough out to feed all four of them for the rest of the week. “’s okay.”

Raúl paused and looked at David, and then he nodded like he knew. “Thank you,” he said tonelessly. He turned away, scratching at the back of his head. “Is Silva all right?”

“Well, he just puked up his dinner,” David snorted. Then he rolled his eyes at the oh-so-concerned look Raúl gave him. “No, he’ll be okay. He’s tough and he just needs to sleep it off. Anyway, if you’re so worried, why’d you take so long to open the door?”

“I—” Raúl started, like he was going to finally drop the nice act. Then he stopped himself, one hand pressed hard against the counter. He looked down at it, then shook his head and looked at David. “Sorry, but I was in here and I didn’t…I didn’t think it was the front door at first.”

David frowned around the food he was stuffing into his mouth. But Raúl had been in…it’d been shadowy, the thing that’d passed by the window, but it’d definitely been the size and shape of a person. “What the hell else would it be? I was kicking the hell out of the door.”

“I thought it might be those noises again,” Raúl said sharply. He grimaced almost immediately afterward, then ducked his head and rubbed his hand all over his face. “Been hearing things all evening. I don’t even know…”

“Look, I’ve heard them too and I know they don’t sound like me kicking a fucking door. I think you’re just bullshitting.”

Raúl jerked down his hand and jerked up his head, and if stares could kill, David would’ve been done over a thousand times. It was—it was impressive, actually; David wouldn’t have credited Raúl with that much intensity, with the way the man shilly-shallyed about so much, acting all humble and like he cared and all that.

“David. I’ve come to realize you don’t like me. I have no idea why, and I have to admit, I don’t like you much either because you won’t explain—but I like Silva, and I wouldn’t put his health in danger, and if I had known he needed me to open the door, I would’ve been there as soon as I could,” Raúl finally said, slow and hard. “Perhaps you think I’m that much of a coldblooded bastard. I’m not. I wish you’d tell me what on earth I’ve done to give you that impression.”

The food in David’s mouth suddenly didn’t taste so good. He grimaced and chewed at it, and finally got it down his throat, but swallowing hurt and for a few seconds afterward, things were pretty sore inside his neck.

“You’re not going to tell me.” The hardness was gone from Raúl’s voice, replaced by a kind of resigned bitterness. Well, that was one fucking thing—the man was always doing that, just giving up when he could fight. When he wanted to fight, when that was obvious from his voice and his eyes, but he just wouldn’t. That wasn’t fucking tact; that was fucking bullshit. “Well.”

“They’re _not_ that loud,” David muttered, just as Raúl was turning away. When the other man grudgingly turned back, David raised his brows and made himself eat more food. That bad taste was still lingering, but David could deal. He was used to that sort of crap. “Look, I have heard them.”

For a moment Raúl rocked back and forth on his feet, looking like he wanted to hit David and like he just wanted to storm off and sulk. But finally he settled in place, expression all reluctant tolerance. “You have.”

“The thumping upstairs, right? Fernando and I went up to look.”

“That’s not the only time—”

David rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Silva’s said he heard it other times. And that you keep hearing it.”

“Nearly every night. And they’re getting louder,” Raúl said almost defensively. He backed up against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest, staring at the floor. “I’ve been here by myself since three, and…it started around four. Just once in a while, but then they started coming in clusters, and louder—like someone was stomping around upstairs.”

“Did you go look?” David asked after a moment. “Chase out the damn squirrel or whatever it is?”

Raúl just pressed his lips together. Then he jerked himself from the counter and twisted like he was going with storming out, after all, but stopped so suddenly he went up onto his toes for a moment. “I thought you said you’d heard them.”

“Well, okay, I’ve just heard it the one time.”

“It is _not_ a squirrel. Or any other animal,” Raúl snapped, turning on David. Suddenly his bloodshot whites and bruised eyebags were front and center. “It couldn’t—that couldn’t make that kind of noise. And no, I didn’t look. No, I didn’t call the police. What would I say when they didn’t find anything? I’m sorry I wasted your time?”

David exhaled loudly. “It’s what you’d normally say, isn’t it?”

The other man shut his mouth. It made his teeth click. He stared hard at David, hard and long and angry. Then he abruptly pivoted and took a step towards the hall, and for some reason David felt like a shit.

A horrendous crash came from upstairs, like somebody had dropped a fucking piano from the ceiling. Raúl’s hiss cut across David’s startled curse; David heard the other man’s feet skitter back towards him as he instinctively looked up.

It took him a second to figure out why things didn’t seem right. That noise had been so loud it’d just about shaken up his fucking thoughts, and yet…the light in the kitchen was one of those hanging ones, a fancy chandelier type thing converted to electricity. It wasn’t swinging the way it would if something had fallen on the second floor and made the whole house tremble, the way that David had shivered for a moment. It wasn’t swinging at all.

Then it was silent. David realized he wasn’t breathing and inhaled, but did it as quietly as he could. He slowly lowered his gaze to Raúl, who was frozen stiff, his eyes as wide and…and as scared, honest-to-God fearful, as they’d been furious a moment before.

Raúl blinked once. It seemed to switch his mode, since then he was nearly running out of the room, and David basically threw his bowl on the kitchen counter to catch up to him. The other man ran down the hall, skidded past a doorway and then threw it open; it was Silva’s room and as David and Raúl looked on, Silva twisted restlessly on his mattress. The kid snerked through his nose, frowning, and flipped onto his other side. He immediately went slack. The noise had gotten to him a bit, but not enough to really wake him. Right then, David _really_ wished he’d been able to get that drunk.

“It worked up to that loud about a half-hour ago,” Raúl suddenly muttered. He turned and looked at David over his shoulder, then moved up against the jamb so David could come into the doorway. “But I thought maybe it’d stopped.”

“So you just stayed here and listened to it this whole time?” David finally said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

The other man started to flick a look at David, but then dropped his head and scrubbed his hand over his face. He dragged his fingers off his jaw and lifted his eyes, and they were wishing David would fuck off again, but not so violently as before. They were wishing it in the way that people wished annoying kids would fuck off, because kids didn’t understand anything.

“It’s _my_ house, David. I’m not leaving,” Raúl said.

Fucking perfect answer, David thought almost savagely. But he just couldn’t work up his usual level of irritation; he raked his hand through his hair and wasn’t really surprised to find his fingers twitching a bit. “Okay, well, so what now?”

Raúl rubbed his face again. His shoulders sagged. “I don’t know.” His voice had gone all thready and shaky. “I really don’t know. I don’t even know what it _is_ , for God’s sake. I just…I don’t know. Are you still hungry?”

David stared at him.

“I couldn’t grade papers with all that banging but it’s a little quieter when you’re in the kitchen,” Raúl remarked, grimly amused. It was hard to tell whether it was at himself, or David’s dumbfounded stare. “Might as well not waste the food, and you always look hungry.”

“Because I’m a fucking poor student,” David said. He looked at the ceiling, then at Raúl. He bit his lip, then held up his hand as he gingerly stepped into Silva’s room. “Hang on. I’m gonna get him, and a couple pillows. We can put him on the dining table. He’s small enough.”

He didn’t hear a word of disagreement from Raúl.

* * *

Nothing else happened that night, but David had a hard time shaking off—and it was just one fucking bang. He had to admit he had a lot more respect for Raúl, if the other man really had stayed for hours and hours of that shit.

Fernando came home around two in the morning, and was surprised as hell to find them all in the kitchen. And apparently getting along too, as far as that meant being in the same room and not bitching about it: David was crowded into one chair with his textbook and one arm out to keep Silva from rolling off the table, and Raúl was at the other end working on his laptop.

Neither David nor Raúl mentioned the bang. Raúl point-blank ignored Fernando’s questions, and David just told Fernando they couldn’t get Silva to move to the bedroom. Actually, Raúl was point-blank ignoring just about everything, except that when Fernando finally went to bed, Raúl scurried along after him and left David to manage Silva.

David thought about taking Silva back to his own room, but it was farther off from the rest of them and that fucking noise…so David got cramps all over, trying to sleep against the wall, and Silva got David’s airbed. And blushed and babbled for five straight minutes in the morning before David could get a word in to explain they hadn’t done anything and David didn’t hate Silva but Silva did owe him plenty.

He didn’t talk about the bang then either. Silva didn’t seem to remember anything weird from last night, so David didn’t see the point.

* * *

The next couple days were nothing special. At first David tried not to be in the house by himself, but he spent so much time at campus anyway that he got fed up and came back one afternoon, and didn’t hear or see anything weird. None of the others mentioned anything either, although it still didn’t seem like Raúl was getting a lot of sleep. He actually seemed to be spending as much time as he could at the house, getting up early to work on small things like replacing electrical outlet plates before he left for work. It didn’t seem like he was having fun with it, but he insisted to the point that Fernando’s chats with David stopped being about Raúl’s ass and started being about how moody Raúl was.

David couldn’t really join in about it, and it annoyed the hell out of him. Which Fernando noticed and asked about, but annoyed David meant snappy David, and so Fernando stopped talking to David except when he had to. Which was even worse.

“I mean, I don’t want to get involved, but…I live with you all, and I just feel like I have to tiptoe around all the time,” Silva said, passing David the bag of popcorn.

The exam grades had come in and they at least weren’t making David want to kill something. They weren’t great for either David or Silva, but they weren’t fatal either, and the two of them figured that that was enough, given all the other shit they had with the house and stubborn stonewalling Raúl and pissed off Fernando. So David and Silva had taken the afternoon off to catch a movie. Some brainless comedy, since it was really so they could take time off to talk about heavy shit without making a whole drama production out of it.

“Yeah?” David irritably crunched a handful into his mouth. And he still didn’t have a job either. He’d gone out and done the applying and the asking, but he could barely get his name out before they were all ‘sorry, no, already filled.’ He was beginning to think that last place he’d tried had blacklisted him or something, which would be just fucking perfect. “Yeah, well, I know. But it’s not like I can do anything about Raúl, you know.”

Silva took back the bag and expertly flicked three kernels, one right after the other after the other, into his mouth in rapid succession. He snorted at the screen, then sighed and laid his head against the top of his seat. “I’m not _asking_ you to…I know. I’m not saying, like, it’s your fault, but it’s just…it’s all really awkward for me.”

“And they’ve been friends for years, blah blah, well, then why doesn’t he know how to sort Raúl out himself? Why does he have to bitch at…yeah. Well, yeah.” Why the hell was the movie now showing a battleship? It was supposed to be a comedy set in France. Okay, David had totally lost track and he didn’t really have the money for this film anyway and this just wasn’t working. He started kicking his heel against the floor. “Fernando’ll get over it. He’s never stayed mad at Raúl for that long. I think Raúl would have to fuck Fernando’s grandmother to get Fernando really—”

An explosion of little white bits noisily shot out from Silva into the back of the seats in front of them. Then Silva did some snuffling and embarrassed grunting, and finally tried to make his seat eat him as he patted his mouth with a napkin. “Shit. Good thing we’re the only ones here.”

“Give me that,” David said, grabbing the popcorn. Well, fuck the movie, and fuck his life. He liked popcorn, at least. “Mother of God. You just can’t be trusted with this stuff.”

“Shut up, I’m not the one who got cherry soda to come up out one side of his nose and water out the other.”

David made a face and jammed popcorn into it. “That wasn’t me, that was fucking Iker and his fucking brilliant idea to tickle me. He’s such a weird drunk.”

Silva snickered and flopped his arm across David. After some groping, he finally got his hand into the bag and snagged himself a good-sized bunch of fluffy kernels. He managed to eat those without spewing them all over the place.

“So you gonna tell me what happened?” Silva said after a moment.

“It doesn’t really matter.” That was a lot of blood up there for a comedy, David thought as he frowned up at the screen. Wait, was the movie _French_? Not just set there? No wonder it was fucked up. And Silva was doing that silent no-look guilt-tripping thing of his. When David looked over, the other man had his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes fixed on the screen, as if David wasn’t even there. “It _doesn’t_. It’s not even about what it was about—that’s what happens with stupid fights. You let them go long enough, then they just do their own thing, and God knows what you actually did to deserve it.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t let them go so long, you’d still know what you did,” Silva snapped. He flicked a positively nasty look at David, then suddenly got up and—and he left.

For a moment David just stared at Silva’s retreating back. Then he jumped up and tried to leap into the aisle—his knee banged on a seat-arm and he dropped the fucking popcorn, all that wasted crunchily beneath his feet—scrambling to catch up. “Silva! Silva, for fuck’s sake—”

“You know what? I’m just sick of it. You’re right, I _don’t_ care what it is. I’m just fed up with it.” Silva twisted around and gave David another angry look. “I’m just wasting my damn time trying to cheer you up, aren’t I? Some people, they just like to be miserable.”

Then he twisted back and kept on stomping out, and despite his short legs he could move pretty damn fast. That, and the goddamn popcorn was sticking to David’s soles or something because he was just about running now and he could still feel it under his feet. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Buy a damn mirror already,” Silva snarled, not looking back. He had his hands in fists and was holding them way out to the sides as he banged through the theater doors. “I’ve got a life of my own, you know. I’ve got other things to do than be your whipping boy.”

“ _What_? How the fuck is this about whipping? I don’t even own a—” David burst through the doors, then staggered, completely blinded by the bright lights. His head spun and he reeled, throwing out his arms for balance.

Thankfully his hand hit a wall. He leaned onto it, catching his breath and squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could, willing them to just fucking get with the program. Then he opened them too soon and had to press his head against the wall to deal with the sudden headache.

When he finally opened his eyes, Silva was long gone. David gaped a bit anyway, then swore and kicked hard at the floor. He stared round at the people in the lobby, giving them right back what they were giving him, then kicked the floor again. Then David exhaled, throwing one arm back to grab the back of his head. He looked around the lobby again before finally stalking out the closest door. Fucking cherry on top, he thought.

* * *

Silva wasn’t working that night, but he didn’t show up for dinner. Neither did Fernando. So it was just David and Raúl—cooking up a ridiculous feast again, like their fridge wasn’t already stuffed—sitting at opposite ends of the table and not looking at each other. Maybe it was childish but David couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck after his day. And Raúl, the gentleman, he was pulling the same shit too.

David finished first and went to go study in his room. For a while Raúl was in the kitchen, but later David heard the other man walking around and then the whine of an electric drill. They were working on replacing the bad floorboards, and some of the constipated-woodcarver interior decoration, too. That was, Raúl was working on it. Some days it was almost like he didn’t even go to his _real_ work. Of course, nobody seemed to ever call him on it.

Well, fuck him, he could have his obsessive hobbies. It wasn’t like David cared.

But it wasn’t like anything seemed to care about David either. He tried his damnedest to concentrate, but when he looked at the clock an hour later, he’d only gotten through two pages of his textbook. His attention just kept drifting off to Silva’s bizarre crack about getting a mirror, or Fernando calling him a bastard, or…

David squinted up at the ceiling. He knew nobody was up there. He knew that all these fucking noises with no explanation were creepy as hell. He even knew that if he had any sense, he’d get out of there and just let somebody else have the trouble. Who the fuck cared what was doing it? What was important was, it was screwing with David’s already screwed-up life and this was one thing David didn’t have to put up with.

So naturally, David threw down his book and stomped out. “Fucking house,” he said, shaking his head. “Raúl?”

After a moment, he heard a muffled, indistinct answer. It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen— _again_ , the man was going to wear out their pans—and David headed that way.

He’d just walked into the foyer when something crossed his line of vision to his left. David turned to look, expecting it to just be a bunch of nothing like usual, but instead he saw Raúl’s silhouette walking into a doorway behind him. “Raúl, your fucking house—” David started, turning around.

“I know, I heard it too,” came Raúl’s voice. From the staircase. Which was now behind David. In the opposite direction of the…the shadow-thing David had just seen, and that thing had looked _real_.

David took a sharp little breath before he could think. Then he did start to think, but he was thinking too much and it was all getting messy in his head, so he told himself to shut up and did the only thing he really could do. He turned back and looked up at the staircase.

It was one of those real grand, twisty ones with two landings, and Raúl was standing on the lower one, leaning over the rail. The real one, and David knew that because they were standing in a house that made weird fucking noises and had man-shaped things walking around, and all Raúl did was blink like he was confused. “Wait, were you up—”

“No, not till after I heard it,” Raúl said. “I was in the old parlor, working on the floor, and I heard it and I came up to look. It wasn’t me.”

“I know it wasn’t you,” David muttered, going over to the bottom of the staircase. Every couple of steps, he couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder at where the thing had gone—Jesus _Christ_ , that had been Silva’s room. “What the hell are you doing? You think you’re going to run up there, and—”

They both stared up at the second floor. David was frozen and he had every fucking right to be frozen because that hadn’t been a thump, or a bang or a crash or anything like that. That had been a _laugh_.

Raúl hissed. He wasn’t very loud but it’d gotten so silent that his hiss sounded as loud as a pair of cymbals. His hands were on the railing and they were twisting it, making it groan so David looked there at Raúl’s bloodless knuckles. Then not, because Raúl had yanked his hands off and pivoted around like he was going to storm a fucking castle or something.

“This is my _house_ —” Raúl was snarling.

He got around the turn before David finally stirred to life. Rotten steps—David’s memory kicked into gear—David’s fucking conscience did as well and yeah, he had one. He didn’t bother with the sugarcoated bullshit like everyone else but he was not a _bastard_ , damn it, and he wasn’t going to sit around and watch Raúl break his fool neck just because of some stupid idea about a fucking ugly house.

So David swung himself around the rail and onto the first step, looking right at Raúl, and he saw Raúl stiffen. The other man’s sharp inhale seemed to sound right next to David’s ears.

David looked higher. Raúl jerked back, then lifted his arm like he was trying to fend something off. But there wasn’t anything there, and that seemed to throw Raúl, too: he stared at his arm while he was shaking it as if he wasn’t the one moving it. Then he shook himself and pulled down his arm and head, like he was just going to plow through it, and that was when David saw it.

For a second. Because then Raúl had dropped below the railing, and David had jumped and cursed at the loudness of the thud—and the thud became a wholesale clatter as Raúl tumbled down onto the first landing. The other man slammed right into the wall, then rolled back, his weight turning him. His arm flopped out and his hand landed on the edge of a step; David saw the fingers curl down and then get _pulled_ straight as Raúl was dragged off the landing. And dragged was the right word. Raúl hadn’t been teetering and he’d been too damn limp to have done it himself, and gravity just didn’t work like that.

The other man fell straight towards David, who instinctively dove to the side for the railing. He got his shoulder braced there and his hand out just as Raúl smacked into him; David’s fingernail damn near got ripped off as some seam of Raúl’s clothes got forced under it, but then David closed his hand on that fistful of fabric and pulled back as Raúl kept sliding past him. His foot skidded off the step and landed heavily on the ground floor, making him fall forward, but that worked out since it basically closed his arms around Raúl.

By then Raúl had lost some momentum, but him into David’s chest was still like being hit with a wrecking ball. It knocked all the air from him and he had to sit down, which was fine because they were off the stairs and on the floor anyway. Raúl didn’t do anything.

He wasn’t—David exhaled deeply when he felt Raúl’s fingers moving at his knee, opening and closing against it. Then, a little embarrassed, David levered Raúl off him and up against the bottom step.

Well, the man was alive. Dazed and clearly in pain, and already bruises were developing on his face and the part of his shoulder that his torn-open collar showed, but he didn’t look like he was going to pass out. His pupils _might_ be slightly different sizes, though. “You dizzy?” David asked. He shook his hands loose of Raúl and started to get up, only to remember how the man had fell anyway—goddamn it, it wasn’t like _David_ had hit his head. He quickly looked up at the second floor, but as usual, nothing. Behind him, around them: nothing. “Can you feel all your toes? Fingers?”

“I’m fine,” Raúl said after a long, gasping moment. He reached towards his head, but then turned it so his hand never made it there. After a long look up the stairs, he grabbed the railing and started to stand up.

“You’re fucking crazy if you go back up there,” David snapped. “You’re not going back up there. I’ll break your neck myself first.”

Raúl looked sharply back at David, but kept easing himself to his feet. His shirt-tails were loose of his trousers and he’d lost enough buttons for his shirt to flap open to a…that wasn’t a nipple, that was another bruise. He lifted his hand to his face again, and this time it made it and he smeared blood on his cheek before he and David realized he’d skinned a couple knuckles. “It’s my—”

“It’s your house, it’s your house. Well, you get yourself killed and it’s still your house, you fucking moron.” David grabbed Raúl’s chin and peered more closely at the man’s eyes—fucking dim light. He couldn’t tell about the man’s pupils, so he started to drag Raúl away from the stairs, only to have to catch Raúl again as he grunted and suddenly crumpled.

“Ankle,” Raúl said. He grabbed onto David’s arm and waist, nearly yanking David’s jeans down in the process. “ _Shit_. Hurts.”

Rolling his eyes, David grappled with Raúl’s uncooperative limbs till he could get Raúl’s arm over his shoulders. “Yeah, how much? You’re not screaming so it’s probably just sprained. There’s ice in the kit—”

“Ha-ha,” somebody said in a sing-song, cheerful voice. Not David or Raúl. Not upstairs either. Downstairs. Like, from the hall.

Raúl hissed again and wrenched himself around, climbing all over David so he could see for himself that it was just—just—it was too fucking weird. If weird was the right word anymore.

“Come on. You got your car keys on you?” David muttered. When Raúl nodded, David just hauled them to the front door and right out of there. And Raúl wasn’t arguing about that anymore.

* * *

They went to campus. David drove and Raúl slumped in shotgun, occasionally deigning to give David a curt answer to the questions David couldn’t stop firing at him. Well, David was a med student and head or spine injuries were fucking serious shit, and okay, fine, David was doing it to think about something besides the way Raúl had gotten his injuries. Whatever. It worked. David didn’t crash the car because he was one wrong thought away from a nervous breakdown.

Student clinic was open but full up with the usual late-night crowd: drunken idiots, a hypochondriac wanting an ear for his whining, two sets of parents with feverish kids. Luckily David knew the two doctors on duty from a previous class, where he’d done pretty well, and they were happy to just point him to where things were and let him take care of it without them. Except for the x-ray bit, which took fifteen fucking minutes instead of five because the radiologist was, inevitably, a Raúl-fan. All fluttering lashes and giggles, as if that was going to go anywhere if it turned out Raúl had a cracked skull.

Raúl didn’t. Raúl was all intact, with the worst bit being his sprained ankle. Nothing antiseptic and gauze and lots of surgical tape couldn’t deal with, and so he had absolutely no reason to be acting like he was a cripple and just muttering directions out the side of his mouth while making David haul him into the car and out of the car and up the stairs and into Raúl’s office—

Fuck, but this was nice, David thought, temporarily stunned. It had a bay window and tasteful wallpaper and carpet so thick David could feel his feet sinking when he walked on it. Everything was all neatly organized, too, either on shelves or sorted into the inbox-outbox thing on the desk. There was a couch in the corner that was bigger than the backseat of Raúl’s car.

“Fuck,” Raúl mumbled, brushing past David. He didn’t even look back, just kept limping along and hissing to himself till he’d gotten to a cabinet in the back of the room. After opening up the bottom, he took out a bottle and two glasses, and…

David closed the door. “Hey.”

The glasses clinked loudly as Raúl set them on top of the cabinet. His mouth twisted up as he started wrestling with the top of the bottle. “I don’t feel like getting ice so it’ll be warm. Sorry.”

“ _Hey_. Hey, no drinking,” David said, coming up to him.

Raúl looked at him then. Like Raúl was going to rip out David’s throat with his teeth alone, and his hair was an inky tangle and he had dried blood on his lip. It was such a fucking cliché that suddenly David would kind of see what made everybody else act so stupid. “Excuse me?”

“I’m the one studying to be a fucking doctor. You don’t drink when you’ve just banged your head. Put that away,” David said, shaking himself hard. Fucking house, it was fucking with him even when he wasn’t there—and okay, yes, it was the house, something was wrong with the house and David was not going to be a chicken about it. He didn’t understand it but he’d fucking _seen_ , and now a lot more, and he wasn’t going to keep faking like he hadn’t. “For God’s sake, we just—that—this is not the time to be _drinking_. What the hell happened?”

For a moment Raúl just stared at him through narrowed eyes. Then the other man ducked his head and sighed, absently pushing at his hair with his bandaged hand. He pulled his nose and stepped slightly back to let David put away the bottle. “You’re right. We should call Silva and Mori, and let them…”

“I’ll tell ‘em we smelled gas. Go sit down or something.” Facing up to it didn’t mean being an idiot. David got out his phone and dialed Fernando—voicemail—and then Silva—coworker.

Then he turned around and Raúl was just lowering another bottle from his mouth, and David cursed because he hadn’t shut the cabinet and because Raúl was just beyond fucking belief. Instead of putting away his phone David stalked over and yanked the bottle from Raúl’s hand—Raúl’s brows went up but he just did his looking thing—then slammed it down on the cabinet.

“That’s very expensive vodka,” Raúl said calmly.

“Yeah? Fucking great. It would be.” David’s phone clattered out of his hand to land on the cabinet by the bottle. He stared at it for a second, then wrenched his head to the side. Then he sucked back a breath and sloshed a shot into one of the glasses still on the cabinet, and downed it. “You fucking asshole.”

“I just got shoved down a staircase. I think I _need_ a drink, doctor.” Well, wasn’t that sarcastic. When David twisted round, Raúl fucking blinked and fucking stared. “What?”

“What? _What_? I don’t even know where to—can’t you say something else? My God, you’re so fucking—with your house and your stupid ideas and your stubborn—” Unable to even wrap his mind around it, let alone describe it, David threw up his hands.

The bottle slipped out of David’s hand and dropped to the cabinet, and Raúl looked at it instead of David. Snarling, David reached out and took a double fistful of Raúl’s shirt, and tore it some more in yanking the other man forward. Raúl’s hand slashed down David’s bicep, then went up again to grab David by the side of the neck, its bandages scratching and squishing beneath David’s ear as they both smashed their mouths together.

David was still cursing against Raúl’s mouth, and it didn’t work with the lips and the tongues and the other stuff in the way but he couldn’t stop it. He twisted his hands in Raúl’s shirt, the backs of his fingers running indiscriminately over skin and cotton. He scraped the dried blood off Raúl’s lip with his tongue and fresh blood welled up; grunting, Raúl curled his nails into David’s neck, scoring up and down. Raúl’s tongue butted into David’s front teeth, then slicked over them and David sucked on it, dropping his left hand to go around Raúl’s waist and Raúl fell on him for the third time that night.

His teeth caught David’s lip as he stumbled, so when it settled down a little, they were both bleeding from the mouth like they’d been punching each other. Once Raúl was balanced on one and a half legs again, he looked at David and David looked at him, and they awkwardly let go of each other.

Raúl drew a breath, but instead of talking he slowly turned. He worked his unsteady way to the couch while David put away the booze and the glasses, then sat down and stared blankly at the far wall. For once David could see the reason for staring like that.

“Did you see it?” Raúl said. He twitched when David came to sit by him, but didn’t turn his head. “Am I going crazy?”

“No.” David pushed out his feet and dropped his head on the top of the couch, covering his face with his hands. He dug his fingertips into his eyes for a couple seconds, then let his arms drop. “I’m not fucking crazy, and I was there. So you’re not crazy.”

Raúl made an acknowledging noise. “Too bad, right? If I was crazy, it’d be a lot easier for you.”

“Stop being a jerk. I’m a jerk, you’re just annoying,” David muttered. Then he turned to look at the other man. “You got most of the way up and then you got all stiff and started shaking your arm.”

“I thought I saw somebody there. In the dark. Their eyes.” It was a moment before Raúl could bring himself to add to those terse words. “Then it went away, but my arm suddenly felt like it was frozen solid. It was just completely numb.”

“And then you tried to go up there anyway, because you’re an idiot, and that asshole pushed you,” David said. He shut his mouth and listened to the silence that followed. It was tense and thick and uncomfortable. “That thing. It looked like a man, but it wasn’t real. I mean, it wasn’t…I could see through it. And it was fat.”

A small, hollow chuckle suddenly escaped Raúl. He turned to face David, smiling all loose and amused below terrified eyes. “That,” Raúl said, “Was my great-uncle.”

David didn’t say anything.

“Or looked like him, anyway. Right down to the waistcoat,” Raúl added more slowly. The smile melted off his face like butter on a hot pan; he ducked his head and rubbed at his nose, then stopped when he realized it was rubbing some of the tape on his hand loose. He carefully smoothed that back down. “He died before I was born, so I’ve only seen photos but they looked like…they found him hanging from the staircase rail—he was about to be arrested for murdering my great-aunt. Nobody’s wanted to live in the house since then.”

“Well, I wouldn’t either,” David finally said.

Raúl snorted as he tipped over, little by little, till he was lying on his side against the couch-back. He kept fussing with his hand. “That house has been in my family for centuries. It _is_ my family. It’s all I have left of them, since everything else got gambled away or sold to pay for more gambling. If I give it up, I have no…no roots.”

Then he just gazed up at David, casual and uncaring because he knew David didn’t give a shit. He was always such a presumptuous bastard, even when he was bloody and bruised and bitter.

David reached out and touched Raúl’s cheek, just under the ridge of the bone. The other man didn’t look at David’s hand; he looked at David’s eyes. He kept looking there as David slowly moved his fingers down, till their tips were just at the edge of the bloody trickle from Raúl’s split lip. When David brushed that off, rolling his thumb gently over Raúl’s lip, Raúl’s eyes closed.

They opened again when David moved up to the other man. He wiped his thumb on his sleeve, then sat up and put one hand under Raúl’s head. He put the other one on Raúl’s shoulder, then moved it to Raúl’s neck as Raúl began to raise his head. Raúl was frowning, and then opening his mouth and David bent and kissed him.

Couldn’t do that for too long, with both their lips, but by then Raúl had put his hand on David’s arm and David had closed his eyes. Suddenly he didn’t want to see if he was getting blood on Raúl’s jaw as his mouth moved there, he didn’t want to see if he was pressing on bruises when he put his hands on Raúl’s ribs. He just wanted to—he just wanted to.

Raúl sat up a little. His arm went around David’s neck, and his mouth touched David’s cheek before nipping at David’s ear. He grabbed David’s thigh with his free hand and David hissed, then buried his face in Raúl’s neck, pressing his open mouth hard against the faint pulse there. It was sluggish but it was _alive_ , and—David pulled at the other man, pulled and stopped to push his hands under Raúl’s shirt because Raúl’s skin was warmer, and then pulled again.

And Raúl came with it, leaning more and more on David till David had to twist to keep from falling backward. Instead Raúl slid behind him and David kept twisting, kept his mouth on Raúl’s neck and turned himself completely around so he could push Raúl down on his back. The other man’s fingers slid through David’s hair, then back again and went down to hook around David’s neck, urging David on as he laved up Raúl’s neck. His tongue went off the edge of Raúl’s jaw and back into his mouth, cold for the moment before he bent again and sucked at Raúl’s lip. His own lip was still fucking throbbing, but he wasn’t noticing it as much, and Raúl didn’t seem to be either, not with the way he was clawing down David’s head.

David wasn’t a fucking bastard. He remembered all about the bruises and scrapes he’d treated just a while ago so he tried to take it out on Raúl’s clothes. His hands got all tangled in Raúl’s shirt and he heard at least one more button pop off before he got them free, showing him a lot more of a toned chest and belly than he would’ve figured for a dilettante literature professor. The muscles in Raúl’s stomach clenched and slid beneath David’s fingers, so he slid his hand up and down them and Raúl made a noise in his throat like he was dying, slow and hungry. His hands kneaded David’s shoulders—odd feeling, one more padded than the other—and then one disappeared and reappeared jammed down the front of David’s jeans, just grabbing David’s prick and fuck but that was direct.

Arching, rasping his breath, scraping his teeth against Raúl’s chest now, David jerked and wriggled till that hand and his prick were out of the damn jeans. His teeth ran across something stubby in all that smooth silky pectoral and Raúl whipsawed, then fell heavily back, white-faced and not entirely in a flattering-to-David way. “Ankle. Fuck.” He tossed his head, then got that stubborn glint in his eye and just _squeezed_ his hand down David’s cock. “ _Fuck_.”

“You have—have—” David shook his head, sending drops of sweat flying from his face to patter all over Raúl “—fuck that, like I’m going to get up and get it—”

He shoved his mouth into Raúl’s nipple again and sucked it hard, then rode Raúl’s twisting body up to meet the man’s mouth again. Their bodies jammed together so tightly, Raúl’s erection grinding into David’s thigh and David’s prick trapped between his own thigh and Raúl’s hand, that David couldn’t fucking breathe, and David couldn’t fucking be bothered to even do anything about that. He just smashed his mouth down on Raúl, took the other man’s breath. His hips were pistoning uncontrollably at this point, his whole back felt like it was going to shake to pieces, so fucking awkward but so fucking _good_ , cock and pressure and roll and _roll_ and suddenly the air was back in him and it was cold and he was slumped over Raúl, panting into the man’s ear.

* * *

It took five minutes for David to get his breath back and sit up and realize he’d just had it off with the man he really disliked. Well, he didn’t fucking know. Something. Fuck, but he didn’t even know what he didn’t know anymore. He kept staring at the curl glued to Raúl’s left temple and the little red dots his teeth had left around Raúl’s nipple, and the whole time his head was telling him he was so very fucking stupid.

Raúl didn’t really seem to know what to do either, which was the only thing that kept David from just jumping out a window. They sort of sat around till the come drying in David’s jeans got too annoying, and then David said he was going to the men’s room to wash up.

He did go do that. And maybe he stood there and stared at himself in the mirror—Silva, shit, shit—and yanked the hell out of his hair while trying to figure it all out—but he washed up, too. He wasn’t a liar.

“I’ve got my own washroom,” Raúl said when David came back and found him neatened up. When David snorted and snapped his typical comment, something weird and blank went over Raúl’s face. It was a moment before Raúl spoke again, and then it was this toneless little voice offering David the couch.

“Shut up and take it so you’re not fucking up your ankle even more,” David snarled, turning away. He went over to the desk chair and sat in it and twirled irritably around till he heard the other man lie down. Then he twirled some more. It wasn’t like he had much else to do.

* * *

David tried sleeping in the desk chair, and the other chairs. Didn’t work. Tried the floor. Didn’t work. He glowered at the couch and Raúl moved restlessly like he knew, even though Raúl had long since fallen asleep.

After a while, David reluctantly came up to the couch. It was so big Raúl didn’t take up more than two-thirds—less when he tried to curl up, like he kept doing. His sleeping issues had apparently carried over and every so often he’d let out a muffled groan and pull up a knee till his foot started to slide off the cushions. He had his arms huddled up around his head too, hiding his face. He looked fifteen that way. A fucked-up fifteen, with his wrinkled rag of a shirt flopping everywhere to show blue-black dapples on his ribs, scrapes on his arms.

Mirrors, David thought morosely. He looked around the room—it felt completely different here, just like it was a plain old room even though it was dark and shadowy too—then squatted down by Raúl’s head. Raúl shifted again, his hand falling off his face so the tip of his nose showed. If David wanted, he could poke it.

Instead David got up and sat down, his back to Raúl’s belly. He rubbed his face, then sighed and told denial to fuck off, and just faced up.

It took a couple minutes to get himself squeezed in next to Raúl. Helped that the other man didn’t wake up—didn’t even really tense, just breathed harder for a second and then he was all floppy and easy to push around. And then, once David had settled, Raúl abruptly twisted so his nose was pushed into David’s neck and his arm fell across David’s chest. David looked up, thinking he was going to be staring at the fucking ceiling for a while, and fell right asleep.

* * *

When David woke up, he and Raúl were still on the couch. Raúl was awake and looking at him, wary and confused, and then Raúl blinked.

“Get some fucking eyedrops already,” David muttered, wrenching himself around. He pressed his mouth to Raúl’s slack lips, then wiggled free while Raúl was, of course, blinking some more. “Okay, your house has ghosts and they hate you, so now what?”

Raúl sat up very slowly. He looked a bit like somebody had thrown him down another staircase. “You know, I thought you were going after Fernando.”

David stiffened, then gave himself a good shake and ran his hand through his hair. It felt greasy and his mouth tasted awful, and his back was all kinked up. Great start to the day. “Yeah, I was. But we fucked, big deal, it happens, I’m not going to have a fit about it. If _you’re_ going to have a fit about it, could you save it for after we figure out why your fucking dead great-uncle wants to kill you and scare the shit out of me?”

After a long moment, Raúl…blinked.

A long, strangled, growly noise came out of David. His hands shot forward and grabbed Raúl’s front, and he kissed the hell out of the other man.

Raúl made squirmy noises but didn’t squirm. His hands did come up to clap over David’s shoulders, but after that he sort of sat there and had David’s tongue in his mouth.

David took it out and jerked back to look at Raúl. “Why are you so fucking passive all the time?”

“I’m not _passive_. I’m—I’m—I don’t do anything because I have no idea what you’re doing,” Raúl said. He started out blinking but rapidly got annoyed and snappy, his hands kneading David’s shoulders. Then shaking them, shaking them so hard that David’s head whipped forward and banged into Raúl’s.

They both reeled back. It fucking hurt—David slapped off Raúl’s hands and yanked the other man forward again, and this time Raúl seized David by the head and fucking got into it. Mouth open, teeth jabbing carelessly into flesh, his tongue sliding wetly over David’s lips. He forced David back and David had to sling his arm around Raúl’s waist. Jammed back his other arm, pushed back and trapped Raúl up against the side of the couch and they were making out like fucking teenagers, frantic and clumsy and so fucking hot David could feel the air melting where it touched them.

This was not really productive. For figuring out what had happened last night at the house, or for figuring out why David would rather see a movie with Silva or stare at Fernando’s ass all day than tell Raúl he was a better cook than David was, yet Raúl was the one—the one—

\--okay, this part wasn’t hard to figure out, especially with Raúl screwing his fingers into David’s hair and eating David’s mouth like it was a fucking fourteen-course gourmet feast. David really _liked_ messing around with the man. It was just all that other stuff.

And because it was David, and his life bit harder than the teeth of his zipper into his half-hard cock right then, ‘other stuff’ knocked on the door and called Raúl’s name.

Raúl jumped and his knees went up into David’s belly, bouncing David right off onto the floor. Cursing, trying not to succumb to a bruised elbow that thought it was dislocated, David rolled over and got himself facing the door just in time to see a clearly not-thinking Raúl scramble over him and grab the knob. David opened his mouth.

And Raúl opened the door. And Fernando was there, and he did the blinking thing and then the up-down scan of gasping taped-up Raúl in shredded clothes. He started to look horrified, which required seizing his hair and looking sideways because his horror was so great, he just couldn’t give it a good forward stare. And he saw David.

David closed his mouth, turned his head so he was looking at the ceiling and then decided that that was the only ugly part of the room. He shut his eyes and slapped his hand over them.

“What the…Raúl.” Fernando’s voice was flatter than a beer left to sit out on a hot day, but underneath there were all sorts of menacing rumbles and they promised painful deaths to the world. “Raúl. What’s going on? I got your—I got David’s message, and stayed with Helguera, and I came over to see if you were…were all right.”

Not looking was stupid, David thought, and he took off his hand and turned his head back to the other two. Well, Raúl wasn’t all right. He was all pale and starting to tremble a bit, and generally looked like he’d just been pulled from a flaming train-wreck. Or maybe had realized that opening the door while he looked like he and David had just fucked over broken glass wasn’t a great idea.

“Oh. Oh, I—Mori, listen, this…this is a very long explanation,” Raúl finally stammered, staring with big old pleading eyes at Fernando. His hands came up and he nervously rubbed them up and down his neck, where there were a whole bunch of hickeys that Fernando immediately focused on but Raúl was making a hash of it and just kept gazing desperately at Fernando. “I mean, this isn’t—there’s more—”

“Like what, a wedding invitation?” Fernando snapped. He stepped back, shaking his head. Then he laughed, long and incredulous and angry, looking this way and that and finally back at Raúl. “ _Gas_ leak? Are you kidding me?”

Raúl winced hard and pushed his hands up his neck, over his jaw and onto his face, where he started rubbing at his eyes. “No. Shit, no, not—Fernando, please, I need to talk to you before you start thinking—”

“But I’m already thinking it!” The slap of Fernando’s palm against the jamb made just about everything in the room jump. Then Fernando closed his hand around the door frame and leaned in, using his other hand to wave around in the air and come dangerously close to smacking Raúl a couple times. “What else am I supposed to think? With you—looking like—and _him_ —” Fernando abruptly slewed round to skewer David on his glower “—you, you don’t even like him! You hate him! Or was that—”

“Mori, listen, there were noises—” Raúl snatched at Fernando’s swinging arm, then dragged it down “—there was a ghost, I fell—”

“And I asked you! I asked you to stay with us! Oh, my God, I asked you, because I felt sorry for you…” Now Fernando was tossing his head back and ranting at the ceiling.

David pushed himself up on his elbow, then rolled over onto his feet. “Wait a fucking second, you don’t even know what hap—”

Fernando’s head came down. “You fucked him.” He stared at David. Flicked a glance at Raúl, still clinging to his arm, and his shoulders went down but when he looked back at David, they went back and David could all but hear the _snap_ to that. Like breaking bone. “Well?”

Jesus fucking Christ but this just had no way of going well. “Yeah, we fucked,” David said.

Raúl wrenched his head around and silently told David he was a moron and out of his mind and _now_ what, and David agreed but what the hell could he say? They had. And he wanted to do it again, damn it all.

He still wanted to fuck Fernando, for that matter, and Fernando had gone still and ashen except for his eyes, which were doing their damnedest to set David on fire. “I…I can’t even…” Fernando started.

“And okay, fine, I lied about the gas leak but there are ghosts and they’re real and one tossed Raúl down the fucking stairs, and _that’s_ why we left,” David added. He ran his hand through his hair, then pointed at Raúl. “I mean, look! He’s bruised all over.”

Fernando looked. Fernando looked for a long time, his lips pressing more and more tightly together, and then he gave Raúl this weird little tight nod. He slowly eased back, gently prying Raúl off his arm; Raúl frowned and started to ask something, but Fernando just put his hands on Raúl’s arms for a moment and looked hard at him. Not hard like he was mad at the man, more hard like he was trying to see deep into Raúl’s soul and fuck, David knew where this was going.

“He didn’t mind! He was just as into it as—and I didn’t do those! His dead great-uncle did it—I mean, the fucking ghost—” David looked back and forth between Fernando and Raúl, keeping an eye on the one and willing the other to fucking help him with this.

“ _Ghost_ ,” Fernando said scornfully. “David, you’re a complete bastard.”

Raúl blinked, got it and immediately shook his head. “No, Mori, he’s telling the truth, it _was_ a—”

To his credit, Raúl was so busy trying to explain that he didn’t notice Fernando cupping his face and bending down till Fernando was well into doing the whole heartfelt soulful kiss thing. Then Raúl was all bulging eyes and muffled frantic noises, trying to shake Fernando by the arms and get his attention, and part of David thought he was an idiot for not _taking_ it when he got it, for fuck’s sake.

Another part of David was grateful. And the rest wanted to shove Fernando off and shove Raúl back on the couch and David just pulled at his hair. It didn’t do anything, including come close to expressing what a fucking cock-up this all was.

“I should have done that a lot earlier,” Fernando said when he was done physically proclaiming his love for Raúl. He stroked Raúl’s cheeks, then fondly ruffled Raúl’s hair before turning to stalk up to David like he was about to kickstart the Apocalypse.

The first step was like that, anyway. By the second, Raúl had pulled himself together and glommed onto Fernando’s side, trying to drag the other man down using his body weight. “Fernando! Damn it, listen to me! He didn’t do-- _fuck_ \--he didn’t do it! There _was_ \--my great-uncle did show—”

David’s own brain finally got into gear and he backed up, then dodged sideways when he realized he was going to be trapped against the couch. He just avoided Fernando’s lunge—helped along with Raúl’s pained hiss and Fernando’s subsequent faltering—then darted across the room to try and get behind Fernando. “You’re hurting his ankle, you prick! It’s sprained!”

“He threw me down the stairs!” Raúl shouted, clawing at Fernando’s back. His eyes met David and he grimaced, then began trying to swing his body from side to side to throw Fernando off-balance. “Not David! The ghost! Fernando! Fernando, would you just stop—”

Maybe he would but David wasn’t about to stand there and find out. He rocked on the balls of his feet, gauging the distance to the door, and then leaped for it.

He got there, but just as his hand hit the knob, something seized the back of David’s shirt. Desperate, David grabbed the knob and yanked himself past it into the hall.

David’s foot slipped. The knob ripped out of his hand and the door went whipping back behind him as he kept throwing himself forward anyway. He got outside but by falling on his face, and that fucking hurt but he didn’t waste time on it instead of scrambling up on his feet. But once he stood up, he realized he wasn’t hearing Fernando’s snarling any more and he turned around to find Raúl sitting on the floor, wide-eyed and panting. Raúl looked at him, then wiped sweat off his jaw and looked down at the slumped body by him.

“You hit him in the head with the door,” Raúl said. He put his hand on Fernando’s back and bent down to peer in the man’s face. “I think he’s knocked out. He needs the clinic.”

“Oh, for fuck’s _sake_ ,” David groaned, grabbing his head with both hands. “How the hell are we supposed to get him there? You’re useless and he’s—he’s…well, look.”

Raúl started to look at David, all “you think _I’m_ useless,” but then he paused. He got all thoughtful. “I can call somebody,” he said.

* * *

Professor Guardiola of the law school frowned down at Fernando. “Raúl, are you sure you’re all right?”

David looked at Raúl, who looked at Guardiola. Then Raúl put his head in his hand and pulled vigorously at his nose. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “I’m still conscious. Fernando’s the one who was knocked out.”

“Well, I can see that, but this all seems very peculiar,” Guardiola said, unbuttoning his cuffs. He rolled up his sleeves, then came into the room and half-circled Fernando before apparently settling how he was going to do it. “David, was it? I think it’ll work better if you take his feet.”

Between the two of them, they got Fernando up and out of the room pretty easily. It was still early enough so that nobody was around to see them maneuver Fernando out the back door and then down a somewhat roundabout but not very visible path to the clinic. Would’ve helped if they could’ve gone a bit faster than a shuffle, but Raúl’s ankle wouldn’t permit it. Anyway, Raúl needed the time to feed Guardiola his rambling story about him having an accident while fixing the stairs, David getting him seen to and then Fernando sort of walking into an awkward scene and completely getting the wrong impression about David working a splinter out of Raúl’s neck.

Guardiola carefully rolled Fernando, who was beginning to stir, onto the examining table. He adjusted the man’s shoulders, then looked up at Raúl. “All right, but I really don’t think splinters have anything to do with hickeys,” he said. He gazed with deep concern at Raúl while Raúl sputtered inanely and David debated whether he was deep enough in the shit for it to not matter if he knocked out another professor. Fucking Raúl and his fucking ankle so he couldn’t help carry Fernando. “Are you _sure_ you’re fine?”

Raúl babbled some more, then suddenly shut his mouth hard, staring at Guardiola. He set his shoulders. “No. My house is haunted and it tried to kill me, and then my personal life turned into a sexual farce.”

David decided he was that deep in the shit, but the professor he’d have to knock out was Raúl, and Raúl was on the other side of the table.

“Oh,” Guardiola said, blinking. He was silent for a moment. Then he put his hand on Raúl’s shoulder, still gazing deeply into Raúl’s eyes. “Would it help to go sit and talk about it?”

“Er. I—thank you, but I think I’d better stay and see if Mori’s all right first,” Raúl said uncertainly.

Guardiola nodded amicably and took away his hand, though David had already changed his mind again about which professor. “All right, but please do let me know how it’s going afterward. This seems…complicated…but I’ll try to help any way I can.”

“Oh. Thank you.” The blinking. The long stare as the other man eased himself out past the incoming doctor. The absent tug at the hair. And then Raúl turned to look at David and shrugged with his big dark mildly surprised eyes. “That went…well.”

“If Fernando thinks I’m the kind of asshole who fucks and runs, he’s got another think coming,” David blurted out. “Or Guardiola. Or—look, I’m not fucking off and I don’t think you want me to fuck off, so you’ll have to fucking deal with it.”

The doctor paused, looking back and forth between them while Raúl flushed up. “Is this a bad time?” the doctor said.

Raúl blinked _again_ and goddamn it, he had the longest darkest lashes ever and the blinking showed them off, and David completely missed whatever Raúl said to the doctor. Farce, all right. Farce and then some.

* * *

They all looked down at the icepack and the little trickle of water rapidly draining out of its burst corner. Then Fernando flung it into the trashcan, his lips curling disgustedly back from his teeth, and got off the table. He got a step before Raúl somehow found another icepack and offered it to him.

For a second David thought Fernando would just pitch that one too, but then Fernando sighed and took it and leaned back against the table. He cracked the bag against his hand, damn near making it explode too, before putting it up against the side of his head. “Listen, I know I overreacted, but I’m sitting here now and not strangling you even though I’d dearly like to, so will you stop lying to me?”

“I’m not lying! He’s not lying! You’re not calling him a liar, and he’s saying the same thing as me!” David yelped.

“He’s not lying,” Raúl said tiredly.

Fernando rolled his eyes. “Ghosts.”

Utterly pained, Raúl just sighed. He looked at the floor, running his fingers over the side of his face and then into his hair. Then he had to push back the strands he’d dislodged and that did something to the wrap on his hand so he picked at that. And the whole time Fernando stared at him, hungry and sad, and the air between the two of them practically belted out a slow-dance ballad.

“If you want me to move out, you can just say so,” Fernando said very quietly.

Raúl’s head snapped up. He actually looked more horrified than when he’d seen his dead great-uncle. “But I don’t.”

“You heard the thumps upstairs, like the rest of us,” David brusquely interrupted.

“I heard the house settling, the way old houses do. I haven’t heard drum sets or seen shadow-people or anything like…and I really thought you weren’t that type.” Fernando rolled the icepack around his head, then took it down and began flipping it between his hands. The left side of his mouth pulled up in a bitter curl. “Of course, I also thought you hated Raúl’s guts. If anything, I thought you were flirting with me a couple times, but what do I know, clearly.”

“I _was_ flirting with you, you fucking idiot—you have the most perfect fucking ass I have ever seen, but God, you’re dumb sometimes. I moved in because of you, not because of Raúl.” If _one more thing_ happened, David was throwing himself out the nearest window. He just couldn’t take the stupidity anymore. “But okay, I slept with Raúl instead but that all happened after the ghost and if there’s no ghost, then how the fuck did Raúl fall down the stairs?”

After a moment, Raúl pinched the bridge of his nose, looking like he’d slap someone if his eyes didn’t hurt him so much. “Mori, for the last time, David didn’t hurt me.”

“But he will. You know that, right? I lik—I used to like him, but I never thought he was a pleasant guy,” Fernando said earnestly. “He’s—”

“I’m right here! And I used to like you too but—”

Raúl shoved himself between them, then kept tipping over till they realized that his ankle had gone. So David got an arm and Fernando a shoulder, and they halfway righted him before they noticed that. Then Raúl had to straighten up on his own because they were busy glowering at each other over him, and David had to admit he deserved the irritated look Raúl gave him and Fernando once Raúl had shaken them off.

“Look,” Raúl said, in a tone that promised swift death to any resistance. “Something is wrong inside that house. I don’t know what it is. But I’m not going back there till it’s out.”

David raised his brows. “What happened to ‘it’s my house, damn it’ and ‘I have no roots’?”

That earned him another glower. Then Raúl sighed and scrubbed at his hair. He had to lean way over because he was basically on one and a quarter feet, after all their antics, and so probably he didn’t notice he’d put his other hand on Fernando for balance. Probably. Oh, like it mattered whether he noticed-- _Fernando_ noticed, all right. Noticed and looked smug about it.

“It still is my house and I’m not giving up on it. But that’s not the same as staying where it can’t get me till we can figure out exactly what is happening, since I can’t very well do much with a broken neck. As you’ve pointed out.” Raúl was looking at David so he didn’t see how Fernando’s smirk crashed off the man’s face. “There has to be a way to get it out. An exor—” Raúl was already making an incredulous face “—I don’t even really know what’s going on. No, I know my great-uncle died there but it’s all…family rumor. People didn’t really talk about it. But I’ve got some family papers…”

“Which are at the house,” David finished as Raúl trailed off into belated comprehension. “Great. Fat lot of good they’ll do there.”

Fernando snorted and pushed away from the table. He carefully rounded Raúl, but then knocked roughly into David’s shoulder as he tossed his icepack onto the nearest counter. “Well, I don’t mind getting it.”

“Wait, I just said…Mori, it _threw_ me down the _stairs_ ,” Raúl said, startled. “We don’t know if it’ll hurt—”

“It’s daytime and ghosts are night-time things, aren’t they?” Not like Fernando was an expert, and he didn’t much sound like he cared about things like expertise anyway. He was just giving Raúl the heroic firm-jawed look, with the wind practically ruffling his hair—and he could pull it off, damn it. Even indoors. “I can see after myself.”

“Oh, don’t be a shit about this. You’re just going to make him bite his nails,” David said, rolling his eyes. “We’ll both go.”

* * *

The last thing Raúl said to them was: “You _idiots_ , why do you have to act like this? This is not impressing me!” He was really coming along with losing that passive-aggressive shtick and being outright bitchy.

Of course, the thing was, was it wasn’t even about impressing him. Bulls goring each other wasn’t really about impressing the cows; impressing a cow just took a lot of parading around and flexing muscles and all that. It was about impressing the other bulls, and yeah, it was stupid and really, really ineffective but David just couldn’t help himself. For fuck’s sake, he was even coming up with lame metaphors to explain it all like it was some classic epic or whatever, and really all he cared about was living in a house that was trying to kill people with one man he was fucking and one man he still wanted to fuck, and his lab/study partner.

Then again, David thought as Fernando pulled the car into the drive, thinking up stupid metaphors was a lot less complicated than thinking about the truth. Besides, Raúl was sort of like a cow a lot of the time, with the balky stares and the general air of incomprehension. So why the hell did David like cows now? He didn’t make sense to himself anymore. “They’re probably in his bedroom.”

“How would you know? You’ve nev—” Fernando stopped mid-cutting retort. He sat very straight in his seat, gazing forward, clenching and unclenching his hands on the wheel. “Actually, just shut up.”

“Well, is it? I don’t want to be wandering around in that place. I saw what it can do,” David said, peering suspiciously at the house.

It looked normal. Just your everyday house, sitting there in the sun. Waiting. Waiting in anticipation for them. If David squinted, he could almost see teeth ringing the windows.

David flopped back in his seat and stared at the windshield. He was losing his fucking mind, was his first thought. His second was: why’d it taken so long?

Eventually he felt the skin on the side of his face singeing and looked over to find Fernando working his jaw, trying to will David into spontaneous combustion. “If you want, you can just sit in the car and wait for me,” Fernando finally grated out, more contempt oozing from him than sweat, and it was already a hot day. The back of David’s shirt was sticking to him. “I don’t mind going by myself.”

“Then why’d I bother to come along?” The car was still running, but David figured if he reached for the door, Fernando’s pride would override his brain and the other man would get out instead of accelerating backward and killing David.

He was right. After throwing the shift into park, Fernando jerked himself out of the car before David had even gotten one foot on the ground and went storming towards the house. By the time David caught up with him, Fernando was on the front porch and fiddling with his keys. He barely looked at David before jamming one key into the top lock. Then the other. Then Fernando just about slapped the door open. It banged hard into the opposite wall, and the sound echoed through the house only a little softer than the racket Fernando was making by stomping like he wanted to break each and every floorboard.

Granted, David wasn’t an expert on ghosts, but he didn’t feel too comfortable about that—well, he didn’t feel comfortable anyway, what with Fernando still fucking thinking David had roughed up Raúl into submission or something worse. But the moment David got across the threshold, his skin was crawling like someone—something was constantly dragging over it, trying to sweep him out the door. And it wasn’t all Fernando deliberately forgetting the weeks and weeks David had put up with his Raúl-maunderings. If that wasn’t compassion and sensitivity, David didn’t know what was.

David slowed, then looked over his shoulder just in time to see the door swing shut by itself. He bit the inside of his mouth, cursed, and hurried up to Fernando. “Is it in the bedroom?”

“Yes, it’s in the damn bedroom. Raúl keeps everything in labeled boxes—my God, you don’t even know that. You just—what is it with him and you, anyway?” Fernando snarled, wheeling on David. He stared for a moment, wild-eyed, before abruptly turning and stalking onwards. “What? The fact that he doesn’t like you either? Which I can’t blame him for, since you’ve been an absolute _shit_ to him right up to—”

“—because I really liked you, not him!” It didn’t seem like Fernando had noticed the door. Probably because he was too busy pretending he was slamming his feet into David’s head.

Rolling his whole head, Fernando swayed with an almost balletic motion into Raúl’s bedroom, carried forth on a wave of his own disbelief. “Then why did you sleep with him? What, is this some elaborate plan to get to me? Because I’ve got to tell you, David, _it’s not working_.”

“Because I wasn’t trying that! It’s not like I meant to have sex with him! We just did!” David temporarily forgot about the door. Hell, he even forgot why they were there. Complete and utter frustration could do that to a man. “I wasn’t trying to do anything to you at all! I fucked him, not you!”

Fernando came to a screeching halt. He stood there for a second, then slowly, ominously turned round to look down at David. His mouth opened and closed a few times without any words coming out. He raised his hands nearly above his head, then lowered them to grab the tops of his shoulders, his eyes wide with disbelief. “David. Listen. I’m—I am madder than you can imagine, but I am trying very hard just to—to understand, goddamn it. Because I care about Raúl—I _love_ the man, can you get that through your goddamn head? I love him, and I’ve loved him for years and years but I just haven’t been able to tell him even though I can tell every other damn person in the world. I told _you_.”

“No, you didn’t,” David said without thinking.

“I did! Okay, I didn’t say the words but why else would I go on and on like I did about his, his ass and his laugh and his awkward dancing, and…and you’re not stupid. You knew. You knew and you went and did that.” The hands came off the shoulders and Fernando nearly hit David in the face as he swung them around. He probably hadn’t meant to do that. If he had, he would’ve had better aim. “Look, I don’t know what you felt about me, but I did think we were friends, at least. But then you go and fuck the man I would happily walk over hot coals for, and…and don’t touch me! I’m not done yet!”

Fernando punctuated that last bit with an irritated brushing-off of his left arm, and a bulging-eyed glower at David. Who was in front of him. Both hands in full view, and neither of them anywhere near Fernando.

He started to get it after staring at David for a couple seconds, and then Fernando went absolutely stiff. David could see the suspicion creep into Fernando’s eyes, but then Fernando jerked himself around, shaking his head. “God, and now you have me buying your stupid excuses. Haven’t you done enough?”

“Wait. It’s not an excuse, and if we’re going there, it takes two people to fuck and you’re not blaming…fuck. Fuck.” Okay, no, David was _not_ being this idiotic. He’d let himself get here but one stupid act didn’t mean he was doomed to be stupid forever, and they were in a haunted house and things were happening and standing around arguing about sex was goddamn _stupid_. “What just happened? Did somebody touch you? Because it wasn’t me. What’d you feel?”

The other man had moved over to squat by a bunch of boxes in the corner, reading the labels. He ignored David, who asked again, and then Fernando muttered something about breezes and like David cared. Something caught Fernando’s eye and he paused, then began shifting boxes to get at one about the middle of one stack.

That crawling, prickling sensation on David’s skin got stronger. He looked sharply around and thought he saw something just whisk past the corner of his left eye. But instead of turning farther to see, he went over and grabbed the box Fernando had just uncovered. “This one?”

“Yes—” Fernando stopped and narrowed his eyes. “You know what really bothers me? You’re going to treat him like shit.”

“You don’t fucking know how I’m going—you know what? This isn’t the place for this. Let’s go.” The box was fucking heavy and David already had to hike it up his stomach. He shoved his hands further under its bottom and took a step backwards, towards the door.

Fernando snorted and crossed his arms over his chest as he straightened up. “What do you mean, this isn’t the—”

He shut up, staring at something behind David. His eyes widened very slowly as he gradually came to believe in whatever that something was. His mouth dropped a little open, then closed as he tried to say something, lifting his arms towards David.

The room was icy-cold, David suddenly realized. He had goosebumps all over, even under his sweaty shirt, and as he exhaled, he could see his breath in the air. His muscles felt like they’d all locked up at once and turning around was like forcing himself through solid iron, but he still made himself do it. He had to. He needed to see.

She was small and thin, her hands little more than bones. Her dress was something out of a museum. The sun was streaming through the windows—David could see a bright patch on the wall behind her, through her—but she was dark. Not dark-skinned, but dark, like she was standing in an unlit room, and David couldn’t make out her features very well. But he still got this wave of unwelcomeness that made him rock back on his feet, it was so strong. And then she came at him, _through_ him, it was so very fucking cold and all around the room, David could hear screaming.

It was only for a second. It was over before Fernando had even finished his hoarse shout, but David literally couldn’t move.

Something seized his arm and dragged him a step. Sensation rushed back into him and he stumbled, then yanked away, only to have Fernando snarl at him that the door was the other—David didn’t even need to be told once. They got the hell out of there.

* * *

They were in the car. Fernando had peeled out of the driveway like lightning, but hadn’t gone more than three blocks before he suddenly pulled over into a parking lot. When he took his hands off the wheel, they were shaking so much that David didn’t argue about stopping while they were still so near.

“You didn’t drop the box,” Fernando said after a while.

Neither of them were looking at each other. They were looking out the windshield, at the people coming and going out of the grocery store that belonged to the parking lot. David didn’t even look at the box on his lap. “Yeah, well, that would’ve made this whole trip really pointless.”

Fernando’s seat creaked. “That thing really did throw Raúl down the stairs.”

“No.” It was melting-hot and Fernando hadn’t turned on the air-con in the car, but David still was numb in patches. He had sweat running down the side of his face and he couldn’t feel his cheek; he poked a finger into it and it was like poking through a thick down coat. “That was a different one.”

A couple minutes passed. “A _different_ one? How fucking many are there?”

“I don’t know,” David muttered. The box was crushing his knees and it was small enough, so he moved it down onto the floor. Then he slumped back in his seat and rubbed at his forehead. “Look, we were freaked out, we didn’t know what to—but we were both there, and we both saw it, and it was just kind of nice to know you’re not the only crazy one.”

“Are you telling me you fucked Raúl because it made you feel better about seeing a ghost?” Fernando asked faintly.

David glanced over, then pressed his fingers hard into the flesh under his eyes. This was a great out and the sensible thing would be to take it. God, he was so fucking screwed and it was all his fault. “No, that’s why I kissed him. I fucked him because I wanted to.”

Fernando kept staring at the grocery store. His eyes had narrowed and several furrows had cut across his brow. “Do you still want to?”

“Yeah,” David groaned, covering his face. “Look, I don’t get it either.”

Much to his surprise, his hand wasn’t needed to block Fernando’s blow because Fernando didn’t hit him. It appeared that Fernando had just sat there and mulled it over. “You wanted to fuck me, right? Still want to fuck me?”

David took his hand off his face and checked, but Fernando hadn’t moved. “Honestly? Yeah.”

“Okay,” Fernando said. He hitched forward funny, like he’d just woken up except his eyes were open. Then he looked at David without really looking at David, and then turned farther around, checking the back as he reached for the keys and the gear-shift. “Okay. I don’t know if it’ll be at the same time as Raúl—I have to think about that. Also, if you’re even thinking in that spiky head of yours that you get Raúl all to yourself, I will kill you. Kill you. Got that?”

“Yeah. No. Wait, what the hell are you saying?” David snapped, twisting around to stare at the other man. “Yes, I can fuck Raúl? Or yes, I can fuck you? I have a spiky head? What?”

The corners of Fernando’s mouth twitched into the kind of smile that movie villains gave when they were gloating, with everybody trapped and ready to launch into the big, tell-all speech that’d been their downfall. Except this one was a lot toothier and sharper and just generally much more likely to fuck David up _bad_. Goddamn it, it was sexy.

“You sound just like him when you do that.” Fernando made a noise in his throat that resembled a chuckle, but then a shrill cry nearby just wiped the amusement off his face. He jumped in his seat, nearly sent the car into the curb and hurriedly straightened them out as the wailing brat’s mother started shouting, too. “David, I just had a ghost claw me. I really, honestly don’t fucking know right now. Except that we need to sit down about this—Raúl and you and me, not the ghosts—and talk about it, but we can’t do that because a _ghost_ clawed me and I think that, that comes first. I think.”

When David looked over, Fernando held up his arm and turned it so David could see the underside. Four long, red lines ran unevenly down it, as if a harridan had taken her nails to Fernando’s arm. In places it even looked like the skin had fully broken and the red was actually fresh scabbing.

“Just, you do not get Raúl all to yourself. Okay?” Fernando added.

David nodded.

“Great. Let’s go see how mad he is.” Fernando turned into the street.

* * *

Raúl wasn’t in Fernando’s office where they’d left him. Granted, Fernando’s office was in a busy part of the building and the new version of Raúl was pushy and loud so somebody had probably heard him. But still, it was—

“Raúl!” Fernando said, looking down the hall. He sounded genuinely thrilled, and even lifted his arms towards the on-steaming man like he was expecting a big old hug.

Not even looking them—at either of them—Raúl went between them into the room; he had a crutch now and he was stabbing it deep into the floor with every step. After a look at each other, Fernando and David started to follow, only to find they’d both been squeezed out of the way by Silva—Silva?

“You assholes,” Silva hissed, whacking something hard into the backs of David’s knees.

Fucking near crippled David, who lost his grip on the box as he crumpled. Thankfully Fernando got the box before it spilled out, so at least David didn’t fall on his face on Raúl’s fucking family documents. Just Fernando’s carpet. At this point, it was really a matter of degree just how beaten David’s dignity was.

“First you make up crap about a gas leak and then you never call back so I’m stuck to crash with Fernando and Ollala, and they have a fight at three in the morning so I’m knocking at Cesc’s window, and I’m worried sick but does anybody call? No!” Silva kept going, whipping his hands in the air like he was conducting Beethoven’s Ninth, till he was right up by Raúl. Then he took Raúl’s crutch that’d been under it and held up Raúl by the arm while the other man got something off Fernando’s desk. “And so first thing in the morning, I’m like calling the gas company and running here at the same time ‘cause I know where Mori’s office is and I figure David, you’re gonna be there too but no! Raúl’s stuck in the closet! Because you locked him in there! And went back to a homicidal house and now I’m canceling the gas company and calling you like crazy, but you aren’t picking up! Assholes!”

Since he was holding Raúl up, the two of them straightened and looked at David and Fernando at the same time. With damn near identical expressions of hurt, anger, accusation, just about anything else that would make anybody feel guilty.

Fernando tried to babble something, rapidly faltered and subsided into self-conscious silence. David swallowed hard, took out his phone and flipped it open and shut a couple times. “My phone’s dead. But I charged it up yesterday.”

For a moment the air turned chilly, and they all looked at each other and all were on the same nervous wavelength.

But then Fernando had to go and clear his throat. “Well, but we got the papers.”

“Thank you,” Raúl said after a moment, measured and slow and totally not grateful.

The distressed vibes from Fernando began to have babies like sex-crazed rabbits. “And David and I had a talk, kind of, before—oh! I believe you now! Because we saw one! A ghost! And Raúl, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, but now I’m not blaming David and I’m not going to kill him, and I think we can work this out. I really do.”

“Well, that’s good for you. And him. Because frankly, you two are the only ones who want it to work out right now,” Raúl acidly replied.

“What?” David took a step forward, then cut across Fernando as Raúl and Silva began moving purposefully towards the door. “There was a ghost! It scratched Fernando and damn near froze me to death, and—what, we got your damn papers! Why are you so mad?”

Raúl actually rolled his eyes. “Because you locked me in a small dark space by myself right after I was attacked in a haunted house, and only went to get those papers so you could have a pissing contest?”

Oh, right. “Oh, right,” David said.

An elbow went into David’s side, and then Fernando stepped out and reached for Raúl. When Raúl promptly dodged, Fernando flinched, then stared mournfully at Raúl, all slumped shoulders and sorrowful eyes and haggard face. “I’m _sorry_.”

“I don’t care! You were an asshole—you both were, and I don’t have to put up with it and I don’t want to! I don’t want to sleep with either of you! I don’t even want to sleep with anybody right now! I just want my house back!” Raúl snapped, wild-eyed, hands flying up into the air.

If his arms were in the air, they weren’t on his crutch and Silva. If they weren’t on those, then nothing much was keeping Raúl up. And if nothing much was keeping Raúl up…

Still, Silva was standing right by Raúl, but for some reason he didn’t make any attempt to catch the other man when he started to wobble. He just stood there, blinking a lot, and watched as Raúl fell over. He didn’t even move when Raúl’s crutch smacked into his shoulder, then slid down his side.

“Raúl!” Fernando got down just a little too late to play savior, but he still made the most of it, patting Raúl all over and looking mortally concerned, like Raúl could tell when he was face-down in the carpet. He helped Raúl turn over and then grabbed Raúl’s chin and looked deep into the man’s eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Wait a minute,” Silva said slowly. His voice had this weird edge to it that David had never heard before, hard and raspy like somebody slowly pulling a knife along a honing stick. “Who slept with who? I thought this was about ghosts.”

So all right, it wasn’t the smartest thing to say. But David wanted to remind Raúl that the man hadn’t been that picky a couple hours ago, and ask Fernando what the hell he’d meant in the car, and also yank Fernando off Raúl or maybe push him further on, and yeah, ghosts and also classes David was missing, oh, _fuck_. And there was too much shit going on.

“It _is_ about ghosts, so why do you care who fucked who?” David snapped.

Silva looked at him. The kid was real, real still. Unnaturally so, what with the eyes of incredulous burning—and then Silva just took a step over Raúl and slapped David _hard_. So hard that David stumbled, lost his balance and was back on the floor, dazed as hell and wondering whether this was really better than a haunted house.

Nearing footsteps made David turn his head. He looked up into Silva’s tightly-crossed arms and stunningly furious expression.

“Because the only reason I put up with your attitude is that I have a hopeless crush on you, you goddamn prick,” Silva snarled.

David let his head fall back. Way too much going on. He just couldn’t take this.

Somebody knocked at the door, then pushed it open. “Hello?” Guardiola said. “Is this a bad ti—Raúl? Are you all right? What happened?”

For fuck’s sake.

* * *

“So if I’m reading these right, your great-uncle found your great-aunt in the bath with her wrists slashed. The police ruled it a suicide, but then reopened the case on the urgings of some of your other relatives, who said she’d found out about your great-uncle’s mistress and was furious, not depressed,” Guardiola said. He paused and adjusted the jeweler’s loupe in his eye, then picked up another yellowed sheet of paper. “At the same time, he was being investigated for financial crimes and frequently complained he was being hounded by even the dead. People just thought he was exaggerating, but on the night he hung himself, a neighbor reported hearing him scream your great-aunt’s name over and over again. The police concluded that was a suicide as well.”

Grimacing, Raúl hitched up the suit-jacket Guardiola had lent him, then tugged his hand out of the over-long sleeve. He reached out and fingered the crinkly, age-faded documents that were spread out across the table before them. “My parents never told me about any of this.”

“Well, it’s rather scandalous stuff.” Guardiola took the loupe from his eye and set it down, then turned to Raúl. Then his eyes widened and he abruptly got up. “Oh, wait a moment. I think I’ve got…”

He went out of the office and into the small adjoining library. His office was even bigger than Raúl’s, with plenty of chairs and couches so the four men—whenever David put “kid” by Silva now, his cheek started to ache—could awkwardly stare at each other instead of trying to kill each other.

Raúl looked away first, but not because he was embarrassed. If anything, he was still seething—it was so weird to see that instead of his usual damp resignation—and was shuffling through his family papers more to point out how _he_ was being productive, hah. Then he looked up, blinking, as Silva came over to sit by him. The vibes from Fernando’s corner briefly went ominous before subsiding into deep, dark, private-rainstorm melancholy. Good thing, because if there was one person who didn’t deserve this shit, it was Silva. Even if Silva was doing things like slapping David and then confessing his crush and God, where was David’s practical little lab partner? Wasn’t anything in David’s life like it was supposed to be anymore?

“Wow,” Silva said uncertainly. He paused and waited for Raúl to throw a fit, and when the man just kept doing his spastic eyelash thing, Silva started craning around to see the papers. “That’s…look, don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s some family history.”

“I know, it’s not very…” Sighing, Raúl dropped the sheet in his hand, then stared at it. Then he shook his head and leaned back against the couch, looking tragically into space, as if he was the only damn man who’d ever had skeletons in the closet and damn it, now it didn’t annoy David so much as…okay, it annoyed David but instead of making him want to smack Raúl out of it, he wanted to screw the man out of it. “By the way, I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I’m sure you didn’t ask for…” he waved his hand around “…this, and the other…”

Silva frowned, then bounced as he got it. His unnatural cheer only lasted a second before he was slouching and adding the ‘doom’ to Raúl’s gloom. “Yeah, well, it’s not like you knew about it till now. I’m sorry I let you fall over, by the way. It’s not like you can help David being a total prick either.”

“Hey, I had no idea you—you—I didn’t know! Okay? I didn’t know!” David yelped, going ramrod straight in his chair.

“No, you didn’t and unlike with him, that really _is_ your fault,” Silva snapped. He was the only one who hadn’t gotten attacked by a ghost, yet somehow he was making the least sense of all of them.

But before David could ask for a clarification, Guardiola came back in with a big cardboard box in his arms. He set it down by the table, then opened up the flaps and began taking out rosaries and little bottles of clear liquid.

“I thought I still had these around. So unfortunately my friend who knows better about this sort of thing won’t be in town till tomorrow, but these should help till then.” And Guardiola looked up and realized they had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh! Blessed objects and holy water keep off evil spirits. Haven’t you watched movies?”

“Yeah, but they’re…movies.” David’s hand started to twitch on his thigh. It was thinking about smacking himself in the head. He was thinking about it, too. “They’re not real.”

Raúl and Fernando, whose arms were now as thickly bandaged as Raúl’s sprained ankle, just looked at him.

“I know, but—really? This stuff?” David said weakly. “Why can’t we just stay somewhere else for the night?”

“Well, of course you can do that too. But I thought you and Raúl might, er, want to get a change of clothes at least.” Guardiola looked apologetically at Raúl, then reached out to pluck at Raúl’s sleeve. He didn’t seem to hear the cut-off growl from Fernando’s corner. “I need this back.”

Blink, then chagrined smile from Raúl. “Oh, obviously. I’m—”

“No, you don’t need to strip for me now,” Guardiola said generously, smiling back, and at that point David realized he was staring far too hard at Guardiola’s neck, judging how his hands could fit around it. Luckily for it, Guardiola took his hand off Raúl and passed the other man some of the bottles. “Just sprinkle the water on you, and wear the rosary.”

Silva leaned forward and helped himself straight from the box. For somebody who’d been so insistent on not believing in ghosts, he was taking this a lot better than Fernando had. Which was weird because Silva was easy-going but not gullible, and maybe David was kind of pissed off about the slap. “How do you know this stuff? Aren’t you a law professor?”

“Yes, but I don’t think law precludes you from having a healthy curiosity about the outer limits of things. Quite the contrary, actually.” Guardiola stopped halfway to standing to beam pleasantly at Silva and David’s nails suddenly jammed down into his thighs. Then the other man got up and grabbed the box, taking it around to both Fernando and David. “Also, I’d try to stay together. Anecdotally, people seem to be more targeted when they’re isolated.”

As much as David wanted to break Guardiola’s neck, he had to admit he was out of ideas about the ghosts and he wasn’t interested in getting attacked again, but he badly needed fresh clothes. He kept catching himself wrinkle up his nose at his own body odor, and the inside of his jeans was grungier than a nightclub bathroom stall at closing. So he took a bottle and a rosary.

“All right, then,” Guardiola said brightly, as if he’d just walked into class, all pepped up with the sheer joy of imbuing his students with knowledge. “Be careful, but remember they’re dead and they don’t really have a right to still be here. Raúl, I’ll give you a ring when I hear from Luís.”

Raúl frowned. “Luís? Luís Figo?”

“My friend who knows about these things?”

* * *

“Because first of all, I have a hard time believing Figo about anything when he can’t even admit to being drunk when he’s drunkenly groped your ass three times, and secondly, he stares at you too much even when he’s sober,” Fernando muttered. He couldn’t quite look at Raúl but he couldn’t stop himself from complaining either as they walked down the hall from Guardiola’s office. “Pep does that too, but at least Pep has the manners to cover it up. Figo just stares and does _things_ with his tongue and doesn’t that annoy you?”

Raúl was using Silva as a crutch again, and as he looked up at Fernando, he adjusted his arm around Silva’s neck so more of him was leaning on Silva. “Mori. Figo has really dry lips and that’s why he licks them. Pep’s always telling him to put something on them. And I’ve never noticed either of them staring at me, and…you know, even if they do, I don’t think you have much right to point it out.”

Fernando winced and rumpled his hair. He looked around, plainly resenting David and Silva’s presence, then tried to lower his voice, like that was going to help. “Look…can we talk?”

“No. I’ve lost my whole morning already and I have to go tell my secretary to cancel class for today so I don’t have to explain to Hierro that I’m acting odd because I have ghosts and idiot men living with me,” Raúl said, brusquely staccato. He deliberately turned his head away. “Silva, if you don’t mind, when would you be—” 

“Oh, I’m just giving up on classes and work today and I can go to the house whenever you want. There’s no way I can concentrate on anything right now. I’d probably end up throwing something at somebody who _actually_ didn’t deserve it.” Silva ducked under Raúl’s arm, then came up snugged even more closely against the man. He glanced over his shoulder at David before sticking his arm around Raúl’s waist.

He was doing that on purpose. That was real, actual vengefulness in Silva’s eyes and okay, Jesus but David had never expected _that_ from Silva but also okay, what the hell? Silva was taking the ghosts as a given, when all he had was mostly what they were telling him and maybe he was buddy-buddy with Raúl now, but he didn’t know Guardiola and if he was that bitter, he had no reason to listen to David or Fernando about anything. Anyway, why was he cold-shouldering Fernando, too? By Silva’s reasoning, Fernando couldn’t have helped being David’s…idea of a perfect ass…any more than Raúl could help being…being…being an incredible nuisance no matter what David felt about him.

“So you’re sleeping in the office again?” David asked. When the pair in front of him ignored him, he reached out and flicked the back of Raúl’s head.

It was a little tap and Raúl totally overreacted, hissing and jerking his head forward. Fernando reached out and shoved David sideways into the wall. Silva took the opportunity to slide his hand down over Raúl’s left buttock, talk about groping the man.

“Mother of _God_ , we all still live together, okay?” And forget about the ghosts too, because David was getting whacked around way more by the living, as usual. Thankfully Fernando was so damn focused on being protective of a man who didn’t want it that his shove had been pretty lame, and David came off with maybe a bruised elbow. He held onto it as he glowered at the back of Raúl’s head. “And I want to know where you are. For God’s sake, I—”

“I,” Raúl said with pompous, ponderous deliberation, confirming everything David had ever suspected about him, “Do not want to hear it.”

And with that, he and Silva took a left and got into an elevator that just conveniently showed up to shut in David’s face. For a couple seconds David just stared at the blurry steel. He’d damn near lost his nose-tip there.

He’d lost his mind, he thought as he moved back. “When he pulls that haughty routine, does it make you want to fuck him into the nearest wall?”

“No, because I actually love him and care about his well-being and would want him to enjoy it, too,” Fernando said acidly. He reached out, stabbed his finger into the elevator button and then folded his arms tightly across his chest.

They watched the numbers change on the dial above the elevator. David smelled like three-day-old cat shit. Fernando acted like he hadn’t come up with the idea of putting Raúl in the closet. The elevator was clearly taking Raúl’s side and wasn’t looking like it was coming back any time soon.

Sigh from next to David. “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

“Shut up. You have an office with a couch and Raúl started off liking you anyway. I’m fucking stuck. I’ve punched half the landlords in town, I can’t afford a hotel room and by the time we get down, Silva’s probably going to have told everybody I know what a shit I am,” David snarled. He glanced at Fernando, then scraped both hands through his hair. “And everybody just fucking thinks that _anyway_ so I don’t get a chance to explain. You do. I don’t hear you saying sorry to me even though you owe me one, and now I’m sleeping in that house tonight because I don’t have a choice and if I get my neck broken by those damn ghosts, you’ll all just say I deserve it.”

The elevator dinged. It opened, the people inside pointed up and David exhaled loudly, curling his hands into fists. He waited for the elevator to close again, then leaned forward and jabbed the button till his finger hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Fernando said. When David looked over, Fernando still had his arms crossed and was standing a meter away on top of that, but he was meeting David’s eyes and his cheeks were on the pink side. He swallowed hard, releasing one hand to run through his hair—he didn’t like doing this—and tightened his jaw. “Truly. I’m sorry I didn’t…”

“Believe me about ghosts that I didn’t even believe in till now?” Oh, and now came the pity. And people wondered why ranting didn’t make David feel better.

Fernando’s eyes narrowed. He slowly lowered his hand, then shook his head and didn’t punch David. “No, that I didn’t stop to think and realize you wouldn’t force Raúl into anything. The rest of it, I think I was justified in getting mad about, but with that I should’ve known better.”

“But I’m still a bastard, right?” David asked after a long moment.

“David, if you really need me to hit you that badly, I can do that. I’m still damn mad at you. But if you’re just doing this to be a prick, knock it off. There’s a lot more going on right now than having the last word.” Then the elevator doors opened and Fernando just walked in without checking which way it was going.

David hustled after him, then turned around to find that they were going in the right direction. For once something wasn’t giving him shit. Then again, the right direction was down and that really was the right direction. “So I’m about ready to say to hell with classes, too. It’s not like they’re useful for anything that might actually kill me.”

“And I don’t have a class to teach today. I have essays to grade, but it’s not like I’ll be sleeping tonight anyway,” Fernando muttered. “By the way, you can have my office couch if you want. I won’t be using it.”

“What—oh, because Raúl’s a stubborn moron and is going to think it’s all fixed now and some beads and one little bottle of water’s going to make him safe?”

Fernando rolled his eyes. “I love the man, but you have no idea what it really took for him to say he was staying away till he knew what was going on. When he gets set on something…” annoyance and amused affection fought for the privilege of gracing Fernando’s lips, then both lost out to bitter regret “…sometimes I do want to just pick him up and _shake_ him. See if he gets some perspective that way.”

“Yeah,” David agreed. He scratched the side of his neck. “I guess Silva will be with him, too.”

“He’s not going to crash at a friend’s, like last night? I thought he seemed pretty freaked out about this.”

Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. Something still bugged David about that, even after he admitted that he wasn’t really that good at figuring out what Silva was thinking at any given time. A crush? On him? Wasn’t Silva smarter than that? “But he’s a nice guy, and if Raúl’s going, he’ll feel like he has to go. Well, I need to talk to him too. If he lets me.”

“David? I realize this isn’t going to make you feel better, but I always thought you knew about Silva’s crush. He’s…he’s kind of obvious about it,” Fernando said slowly. “It’s part of why I never thought you were flirting with me—I mean, you and he always hang out on top of that, more than anybody else I’ve seen you with, so I thought you two were already kind of…”

The elevator opened. Stayed open for a couple seconds. Started to close, and then David jerked to life and stuck out his arm to slap back the doors. He walked out, shaking his head. “Okay, I’m a bastard! I get it! I admit it! Are you happy? Is everybody happy now? Are we done with this yet?”

They’d come out into a lobby area. People were staring. People were pointing and leaning towards each other and whispering, and even though this was the law school and David didn’t know a damn person besides Guardiola, David could feel the blood running up into his face. He turned this way and that till he found the door, then went for it.

Fernando caught up when David was opening it, looking all sorry and great, that was real helpful now. “David—”

“I’m a bastard,” David repeated. He went outside and stood in the sun, then scrunched his eyes shut. He took a breath, opened his eyes, and set his shoulders. “Fine, whatever. I’ll deal. But first I need a fucking shower and I need some clothes.”

* * *

David also needed food. This his stomach informed him while he and Fernando were sitting in Fernando’s car outside of the house, staring at its dark or boarded-up windows and jiggling their holy stuff.

“You really have no sense of respect for anything,” Fernando said after a moment, half-awestruck and half-irritated.

Well, it wasn’t like David could help having basic bodily needs, and sorry if that messed with Fernando’s idea of the proper way to contemplate confronting psychotic ghosts. He didn’t bother answering, just got to unscrewing his bottled holy water.

Trying to unscrew it. After he found himself clamping the tiny bottle between his thighs and leaning his whole upper body weight down on it, David held the damn thing up to eye level and noticed that a thick crust of rust was all around the cap. Funny, that. One would think God’s blessing would keep it pure and virgin and whatever. Just who’d blessed this stuff anyway?

“Here.” Fernando held out his bottle, which of course wasn’t all grungy and opened just fine and fuck it, universe, David hated it right back.

They sprinkled holy water. They put on the rosaries—Fernando’s was so long it got tangled up in his hair, and while he was working the beads loose, David saw that the other man was already wearing a small silver crucifix. It hadn’t seemed to help Fernando much earlier, but then, maybe Fernando hadn’t gotten it kissed by the Pope or whatever. Maybe David was suddenly looking at Fernando’s bandaged arms and wondering just what kind of blessed objects a lawyer would have around. It wasn’t like that profession was generally on good terms with the Church.

David looked at the house again. It didn’t do anything. Which was so goddamn _typical_ of it and of everything else in his life. Just sitting back, acting all innocent, like most things weren’t two-way streets and God, he was so tired of being the only damn person who owned up to his part. Fuck _this_.

“David? David, stop—David, wait up,” Fernando called after him. The other man’s steps came after David, stopped, then went back to the car. Fernando had forgotten to shut his door. Great time for him to rediscover his practicality, after he’d tried to strangle David and had insulted the hell out of David on top of that.

Okay, David was moody and resentful and not the easiest person to get along with. He’d admit that. But it wasn’t like other people didn’t have issues, too, like Fernando’s cockeyed devotion to all things Raúl, to the point of not even caring what _Raúl_ thought sometimes because it didn’t fit with his stupid Raúl-ideal. And Raúl’s ridiculous insistence on having things always be prim and proper so he couldn’t roll with a fucking punch if it didn’t follow the rules of gentlemanly fisticuffs. And…and…

And David was just thinking that Silva was way too easy on David, but that wasn’t really an issue the same way the others were so maybe Silva was the one normal, nice one of them. Except David had stepped onto the porch and reached for the doorknob, only to have it swing away from him. He’d tensed up and grabbed for his rosary, but before he could yank it off and whap it at the ghost, the door opened enough for him to see it wasn’t a ghost. It was Silva.

“Oh,” Silva said, eyes widening. He jumped a bit, then cursed and scrabbled to keep the things in his fully-occupied arms from falling out.

One thing did anyway and David caught it: a recorder. He looked up and was going to hand it back to Silva, but stopped because Silva had this terrified guilty expression on his face and that was weird, and David’s skin was crawling once again but in a completely differently bad way. He hadn’t even known there were variations on that.

It was inevitable that David would poke the Play button and the recorder would begin emitting thumping noises. Suspiciously like—he looked back up at Silva.

Silva also had a bag of laundry and a couple textbooks. He clutched them hard to his chest like that was going to protect him from the realization that was creeping over David, like a fiery red haze. “Listen…David, I know what this looks like, but I really wasn’t here last night and I don’t know…”

“What’s going on? Silva? What’s that?” Finally catching up, Fernando came onto the porch and then peered down at the still-thumping recorder in David’s hands. He frowned, tilted his head, and…of course narrowed his eyes at David. “What the _hell_ is—”

“You know what? I did want to fuck you, I wanted to fuck you and then stay afterwards and do all that cuddling shit and so bad that I was a fucking moron about it, but to hell with that,” David said, shoving the recorder into Fernando’s arms. “You’re a dick too. You’re a dick and you don’t even see it, and I’m just not that fucking far gone.”

Then David shouldered past Silva, who tried to reach for him but David wasn’t having it. He swerved away, then turned back when he saw he wasn’t going the right way. Then he headed straight for his room, breathing through gritted teeth with the world still vaguely reddish. If any ghosts wanted to mess with him, well, they couldn’t do worse than the living. So fuck them, too.

He got into his room and nearly tripped over his bookbag, he was so fucking mad. For a moment he stood there and tried to figure out why kicking the thing in retaliation wasn’t going to work. Then he blew out hard through his nostrils and grabbed the bag, going around the room and stuffing clothes and books into it. Not all the books fit, so David slung his bookbag over a shoulder and started filling up his laundry bag.

When that was full, he whirled around and went back through the hall and into the foyer. Up ahead he could see Silva and Fernando out on the porch, the open front door framing their exchanges of demonstrative hand-gestures. Fernando looked furious, so hey, he’d finally gotten it right. Too late again. David considered going out the back door instead.

A cold wind that had no right to be there skittered over the back of David’s neck. He shivered, his anger shrinking a bit. Then he clenched his teeth and got pissed off over _that_ , because damn it but all he had left right now was his rage, and it wasn’t getting cut out from under him, too. “You fucking assholes, why don’t you try and fuck with me?” he hissed, still walking.

He didn’t even bother looking back. He heard creaking, and voices, and then that wind blew at him again, only from the opposite direction like it was trying to drag him back. It clawed at his arms and legs so that he felt like he was moving through thickening liquid, and David had to put his head down and lean all his weight forward to get through it. He was only a couple meters from the door and funnily enough, the two men outside didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.

David kept going. The voices got louder, echoing weirdly like they were _inside_ him and they were saying shit about how worthless he was and how he wasn’t wanted and for fuck’s sake, was that all? “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck _you_ ,” he muttered to himself. He squinted at the door, then let his bookbag slide off his shoulder and threw himself into its swing, using its momentum to carry him out the door. “Fuck you, is that all—”

The bags made it through. Then it was like David hit a wall. He slowed, then stopped moving and he was in the fucking _air_ , both feet off the ground and just hanging there like somebody had grabbed him and was trying to haul him back. The rosary was stretched tight against his neck, beads digging hard into the flesh, but the loop of it was pulled forward with the bags and as David looked at it, he could see the string going taut. He was actually going backward.

Fernando looked up. His eyes went wide, and then he swore and grabbed David’s bookbag. “David!”

That got Silva’s attention. He looked, paled to nearly bloodless and lunged at David’s laundry bag; David saw Silva’s foot start to cross the threshold and somehow he knew that wasn’t good but he couldn’t make his voice work.

But Silva seemed to feel it and immediately yanked himself backwards. Good for him, even David wasn’t that mad at him, but that left Fernando to counterbalance the pull on David’s feet and the veins in Fernando’s arms were bulging, the sweat was breaking out all over Fernando’s face, but Fernando wasn’t going to be enough. For that matter, David wasn’t going to be enough: David’s fingers were slipping on the bookbag straps and he was going to get eaten, wasn’t he? By Raúl’s fucking dead relatives. If this wasn’t a fucking commentary on his life, he didn’t know what was.

Silva reappeared in the doorway. He had something in his hand that he threw at David—water splashed into David’s face, making him close his eyes. So he didn’t see what happened, but the next thing he knew, he was on the porch in a jumble of his stuff and Fernando, and his knees and one shoulder were killing him, and somewhere behind him a door was slamming shut.

“Guaje! David! Are you all right?” Fingers anxiously patted all over David’s back and head.

“Get off my hair,” David mumbled. He tried to sit up, put his hand down on Fernando’s arm and slipped and fell on Fernando again. “Ow. Fuck.”

The fingers got out of David’s hair. Fernando wriggled out from under David, then was considerate enough to move whatever was crushing David’s hip. “He’s all right. David, what the hell happened?”

“I didn’t do it!” Silva said. “There’s no way I could’ve—that _thing_ had your ankles!”

David contemplated the grit stuck between the boards of the porch. “I heard it coming but I told it to fuck off because I’m way too pissed off for this shit.”

Both Silva and Fernando were quiet for a moment.

“David—” one of them finally started, exasperated.

The house whammed something. Silva sucked in his breath, then scrambled to his feet, grabbing bags and bundling off the porch like a living pile of laundry. Fernando tossed David over a shoulder, giving him a perfect view of that ass in exactly the wrong time for David to enjoy it, and once again, they all got the hell out of there.

* * *

A couple minutes afterward, in the car, the feeling came back into David’s body all at once and it was one of the most painful experiences he’d ever had. It was worse than the time when they’d been messing around with dry ice in lab and he’d been drunk enough to take up the dare about holding it the longest. Everything burned, and when it stopped, he had cold sweat running off him in fucking rivulets. He laid there across the backseat and tried to catch his breath.

The front doors opened, shut, and the car started. David managed to move his head so he could see Fernando and Silva. “Where’d you go?”

“Got Raúl’s and Mori’s stuff,” Silva said tersely. He shifted something, then hooked his arm over the back of his seat and twisted to look at David. “You okay? We’ll be back on campus as fast as we can.”

“…you went back in there?” David finally hissed.

Silva grimaced, then shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s not like any of us are going to be sleeping there tonight, so we needed…Mori got a bedroom window open and I splashed a lot of holy water around. It’s okay, we did it quick.”

“Quick? That makes it okay? Are you fucking kidding me?”

* * *

The look Raúl gave David was exactly like the look Silva had given David in the car. “I don’t think you’re much of an authority on self-preservation, David.”

“Look, just because I get mad and do stupid things doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize a stupid idea when I see one. If anything, it means I know better than you what a stupid idea is, and this is one of them,” David snapped. He stalked across the room and began to bend down towards his laundry bag, only to have to stop when his towel started slipping. “And I just told them to fuck off. You’re talking about trying to actually make them do that.”

They were in Guardiola’s guest room. Guardiola hadn’t batted an eye about it, but had just found them airbeds and extra toiletries. Guardiola had been very sympathetic and kind, and he _did_ stare at Raúl a lot. Good thing he’d gone back to campus with Fernando to work, or else David might have proved his point by getting himself thrown onto the street for seeing if Guardiola would be that nice after getting punched in the face.

Goddamn it. David squatted down and stared at his clothes and rubbed at his damp hair. At least he’d gotten a shower and didn’t feel on the outside like he was a dirty, smelly piece of shit. The inside was a different story but he could deal with that when he remembered which pairs of underwear were clean. “Where’s Silva?”

“I think he’s studying in the kitchen,” Raúl said, curt and slightly muffled. When David looked up, Raúl was pretending to grade papers but he was clutching that sheet so hard that deep ripples were fanning out from his fingers. He was just staring at it with the end of his pen in his mouth, and it looked like in a second the pen-end was going to snap off between his teeth. Then Raúl glanced over, saw he’d been caught out and removed the pen while sighing. “He told me he was…he just had the tape recorder. So some of the thumps were that, but not…and it was some silly idea to get you to pay attention to him.”

“Don’t call him silly. Like _you’re_ an authority on that.”

Raúl paused, then slapped down the paper and stared hard at David. “Well, what am I supposed to call it? Sweet? I’ve been losing sleep and now I can’t even step foot in my own house, and even if it wasn’t all him, he didn’t help. And what did I do to him? If you would’ve just—”

“Shut the fuck up. You can’t talk, you had the same fucking problem with Fernando,” David snapped. He started to get up, but his towel began to untwist from around his waist and he had to thump his knees down hard to pinch the cloth between his thighs. Then he grabbed the hem and started rooting around in his laundry bag. “He just about called me a fucking rapist because he was all—”

“I know and I’m still mad at him and he’s not getting anywhere near me till he figures out I’m not some defenseless—defenseless—baby kitten. He put me in a _closet_.” Then Raúl exhaled, long and irate. He stared straight ahead of him, angrily twiddling his pen till he twiddled it right out of his hand. Then he watched the pen fly out and smack against the top of his foot, which was propped up on a coffeetable with plenty of ice packed around it. His mouth pursed, flattened and then opened to let out a sigh as he slumped disconsolately. “Does that make you feel better? I’m madder at him than I’ve ever been. It was like he didn’t even _care_ what I thought about, about you or the house or…and he’s never…”

Like Raúl knew anything about being mad. He couldn’t even keep it up for more than—he’d stayed up for longer when they’d been rubbing up against each other on his office couch. Now he was just sitting there and staring blankly and looking all, “help, help!” and David could actually understand where Fernando had been coming from. Sort of. Not—oh, fuck, David _did_ feel sorry for Raúl. Like Raúl knew anything about hating himself.

David gave up on his laundry and went over to the couch. He waited a second and Raúl didn’t look up. He sat down and Raúl twitched, but only to look at the half-graded paper in his lap as if it was some strange disgusting bug.

When David took away the paper, Raúl finally raised his head and frowned, all stern headmaster in his borrowed clothes and unraveling bandages and mussed hair. “David, that’s mine.”

“No, it’s some kid’s and it’s not like you really look at them when you think about what grade to give them,” David muttered, tossing it on the floor. He’d left wet finger-marks on it, and they were making the red ink of the corrections run like blood—David grimaced and looked away. “I should know.”

“No, you shouldn’t because you’re not a professor, are you? I _do_ look and I do care and not everybody’s as much of an ass as you are,” Raúl snapped.

David shoved his hands into the sofa cushions and clenched his jaw and looked Raúl right in the eye. “I like you.”

Raúl _did_ look like a cow when he stared like that. An attractive cow, but still a cow. Somewhere, somewhen, something had really gone wrong with David’s brain.

“I like you, and I liked fucking you, and I would really like to do it again,” David made himself continue. He started shifting around. Then he took his hands out of the couch and fiddled with his thumbs to keep from shifting right out of his towel. “Okay, look, I don’t really _like_ you. You still piss me off most of the time and you have an incredibly bitchy house. But I—I really want to hurt your house for hurting you, and I’m mad at Fernando for acting like he’s got a fucking _right_ to you even though I still like him a lot more than you, and look, do you want to make out?”

“What?”

“I mean, why do you always say that? Or blink? I know you’re always confused but can’t you vary it up a little? Don’t you get bored of being boring?” Okay, now David’s mouth was getting away from him, sounding all irked and yelpy, and he was kind of throwing his hands around too even though this didn’t exactly need gestures. He wasn’t really doing this well, but then, he had no idea what he was doing and there was this annoying bit of towel sticking to the crack of his ass that he couldn’t get at because Raúl was there. He really should’ve gotten dressed first. “Do you even like me?”

“I don’t know.” Raúl paused, then threw up his hands. “I don’t know! What am I supposed to say? I can’t be tactful because that annoys you but you just never make any _sense_. I never know what you’re really feeling and you’re good on a couch but that doesn’t mean anything—”

David rolled his eyes and grabbed Raúl and pushed him over. Something cold splashed on David’s back—dripping from Raúl’s icepacks—and then Raúl’s hands were scorching in comparison, pressing hard over David’s spine and ribs as they did some mouth-mashing. Which was annoyingly good but kind of wrong and when David jerked back, he just wanted to scream for something to explain what the hell was going on.

Instead he just got Raúl, mouth bruising up, eyes hazy, and: “This is _still_ a couch.”

“I hate you,” David said reflexively. They stared at each other, and then David grimaced and looked away. His arms were starting to hurt so he shifted so he could lie on them; Raúl flinched and David moved his foot off Raúl’s ankle. “Okay, I don’t. Okay, look, I can’t do this if you really hate me. I’m an asshole, I know, but I’m not _that_ kind of asshole.”

The haze from Raúl’s eyes cleared up. The bruised mouth didn’t and Raúl looked kind of embarrassed when he tried to purse his lips and ended up wincing. He took one hand off David’s back and messed with his hair, then covered his face and sighed into his fingers. “Well, I never thought you were until you helped lock me in a closet.”

“I’m sorry.” David watched tensely as Raúl took away the fingers. “I was mad at Fernando, all right? Because he’s such a fucking idiot sometimes, and I do like you and I’m not going to give up on somebody I like just because somebody else says so. They have to say so. The somebody I like. I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Raúl said, for once giving David a break. Even if he looked irritated about it. He pulled at his nose. “I…well…David, I fell in love with Mori years ago and always thought I’d grow old waiting for him. And I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve seen much of your nice side but you kind of stick to a person. And it’s hard to think about this when I’m still trying to tell myself I’m not crazy for seeing ghosts.”

Oh, for…at this point that was nothing but an excuse. The whole ghost-thing was really kind of beside the point, except for when they were trying to kill people. Which wasn’t right now so what the hell did ‘stick to a person’ mean? What was with Raúl and Fernando throwing out these random phrases about David? Did they cowrite them or something? Did that come with the hopeless unrequited love crap? “Look, do you want me to get off you or not?”

Raúl put down his hand and went back to staring at David. “I don’t think it’s about that.”

“Shut up and answer the question,” David said.

First Raúl blinked. Then he narrowed his eyes. He raised his hand, lowered it. Wriggled around and looked to the side and then he looked at David again, trying to kill David with his discomfort. He really, honestly was fucking lousy at this aggressive thing. “David, you’re wet and _naked_.”

“Yeah, well, you like that? Besides, I have a towel on.” David arched his brows and his towel fell off. Seriously. No ghosts and it just slipped off into a smushy puddle on the floor. “Oh. Oh, well, like that matters.”

“Yes it—no! No, I don’t want you to! But I don’t want you to be a bastard either!” Raúl finally spat out, jerking both hands around for emphasis.

“Okay,” David said.

He didn’t move. Raúl didn’t move. The water on David’s skin moved, dripping off him onto Raúl and soaking into Raúl’s clothes, and even though neither of them were moving, Raúl’s shirt started getting stuck up against David. First a bit against David’s thigh and he did move then, trying to get it off, but there wasn’t enough room and he had to put his knee back to keep from falling off the couch, which got a whole swath of cloth stuck to his leg. So he scooted up and maybe his stomach bowed or something because next he had the shirt creeping up that onto his chest, and finally he just reached down and pulled off Raúl’s shirt. His hand got all tangled in the damp cloth and ended up on Raúl’s chest; Raúl’s pupils widened sharply and he went perfectly still.

“Okay.” David pushed his hand up Raúl’s chest and got it out of the folds of the shirt, running his fingers over the scrapes and cuts on Raúl’s shoulder. He fingered a bruise on the edge of Raúl’s jaw, then bent and kissed the man.

Okay. Well, they weren’t making out, they were actually kissing, and it wasn’t bad. Raúl’s hand came up and curled over the back of David’s neck, then traced along David’s hairline as David ran his tongue across Raúl’s front teeth. Lapped it over the teeth, stuck it down under Raúl’s tongue and Raúl’s shirt was stuck to David again because Raúl had gotten his knees up, cradling David between them and okay. Not really okay. Okay, _good_.

Eventually it was okay, need to breathe, and David pried himself off and looked at the end of the couch. He actually didn’t want to bang his head against it. He didn’t get that at all, but frankly, he wasn’t going to bother thinking about it till he was the only one who wanted to bang him around. He had enough bruises already.

“But I still want Mori,” Raúl said. “And what about Silva?”

“I don’t know.” David looked down, then rolled his eyes at Raúl’s incredulous look. “I’m not them! I’m me! I don’t know what about them.”

Raúl looked like he was going to blink, but actually he got his hands under David and pushed David off him. Then he sat up and rubbed his nose. “And I was beginning to think you think better when you’re naked.”

Something wet was under David’s foot. The towel. He kicked it up and tossed it over his prick. He was being immature but Raúl was a fucking prude for somebody who couldn’t seem to help himself on couches.

“All right, look, I need to talk to Mori, anyway,” Raúl said. “You should go talk to Silva. He’s really upset now, actually. I don’t think he believed in the ghosts till he actually saw it attack you, and now he thinks he woke them up with his tricks.”

“I thought you were mad at him too,” David replied.

The other man was busy getting his essay and pen back, but when he was sitting on the couch again, he took a moment to give David an eye-roll. It was funny but he got on David’s nerves a lot less when he was acting a bit more like your average slightly dickish man, and not like some immaculate saint. “I am but I already talked to him and I can understand, anyway, and all right, it’s hard to be mad _at_ him. He’s so upset already that I don’t see the point.”

“But you were bitching to me about him.” David scrubbed at his head, then felt the towel. It was sopping wet and fuck it, if Guardiola was going to be nice, then he could find more towels for the rest of them. David needed another one. “You’re kind of a hypocrite.”

Raúl flipped the pen in his fingers so he was holding it like a dagger. He frowned at the paper, then found his place and started writing. “And you’re a bastard who’s too scared to get dressed and talk like a normal person.”

“Yeah, well, you just _kissed_ that bastard,” David snarled, getting up. He slapped the towel over his shoulder, which was nice for making his point but he forgot that wet towels snapped like whips and the end went stinging into his back. He jumped, then grabbed his laundry and stomped back into the bathroom. On second thought, he didn’t like this new Raúl. It was a lot better at making him feel like an actual shit than the old one.

Thing was, new Raúl was right. Still gritting his teeth, David went to get dressed.

* * *

Silva looked up, jumped and fell off his chair. His pencil went rolling towards the edge, then disappeared over it just as Silva’s hand grabbed it. The hand promptly went down and a muffled, pained yelp drifted up.

David looked at the papers and books spread over the kitchen table, started to reach for one and then jerked back his hand. He went and rattled the cabinets so he could get himself a glass of water.

When he had that, he turned around and Silva was standing nervously by the table. “Um. I’m so, so sorry. Are you going to kill me?” Silva asked, voice cracking.

Water suddenly seemed stupid. But when David looked in the fridge, he just saw a half-empty liter of milk and a whole shelf of bottled water. Different brands, different sizes, different promotional versions…David straightened up and found himself facing a pro-environmental calendar, exhorting him to recycle and reuse and all that shit. He looked back in the fridge, then shut the door and turned around. Silva was still staring at him, wide-eyed and stiff and scared.

“God, _no_ , no, I’m not, okay?” David muttered, tossing back his water. Some of it splashed down his chin and he wiped it off with the back of his hand, then started searching the cabinets again. Guardiola had to have some booze somewhere. The man taught law, and given his fridge, he had the latent hypocrisy down so he had to have the moments where only a shot of something hard would keep him from going insane. “Why does everybody think I’m going to kill somebody? I’m a _med_ student, for God’s sake. I want to heal people. Eventually. If med school doesn’t kill me, if you’re going to talk about killing—”

“I just—I’m sorry, I really am, but it just was so frustrating. I was doing everything I thought I could do, short of just writing it on my chest and whipping off my shirt in front of you, and you just weren’t _getting it_.” Silva shuffled around behind David, then sat or leaned on the table so it creaked and freaked the hell out of David for a second. “It was driving me even crazier than having a crush on you.”

No booze. Not even a fucking bottle of whiskey tucked away in a back corner. All David found was more bottled water in a bottom cabinet, as if even a lawyer would have that bad a case of dry throat. Unless he was infected with the same problem as this Figo with the over-dry lips and was David looking forward to meeting him already. Jesus. Why was there no fucking liquor?

“So I thought—I know it was really dumb, and also wasn’t nice either because Raúl and Mori never knew and it got to them too, but I just—can you even understand? Do you know what it’s like?” Silva was going on, his voice getting stronger and more aggravated. Not so fearful of homicide now. “I couldn’t even give up on you! Because I didn’t know how you felt! I did everything but ask—”

Jesus, David was doing this dead sober. David looked into his empty glass, then grimaced and dropped it in the sink as he turned. He looked Silva in the eye. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

“Because you could’ve said no!” Furious, hands flinging out like David was getting another slap, Silva stared right back at David. “How do you not get this? You’re the same way over Mori!”

David opened his mouth to say that that wasn’t true, but then he thought about it. “Oh,” David said.

Nobody said anything for a couple minutes. Somewhere else in the house, a door opened and shut and David thought about that for longer than he should have. Mostly because he didn’t know why it was worth thinking about, and then he remembered that in Raúl’s house, it wouldn’t just be some door opening and shutting. But this wasn’t Raúl’s house, this was Guardiola’s house and even if Guardiola was some water-guzzling freak of nature, he didn’t live with a bunch of psycho ghosts. So okay, somebody had come back. They weren’t coming into the kitchen. Never mind.

Silva put up his hand and rubbed hard at his face, like he’d just pulled a twelve-hour shift helping out at the student clinic. His fingers pulled down his lower eyelid so David saw the wet pinkish underside of it, then let that snap up as Silva sighed. “Oh, my God. You mean you…you _just now_ realized…”

“Look, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time thinking about how I act. I just do it. I’m not that—that—what do people say, that introspective. Assholes aren’t,” David snapped defensively. He rubbed his own face, then tugged a handful of hair as he tried to figure out how he was doing this. Then he remembered he’d just said he didn’t do that, and he was totally right because he was totally lousy at it. Damn it, even when he won the argument, he lost.

“You’re not an asshole,” Silva protested.

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you’re—”

David rolled his eyes. “I am and you know it and stop sucking up to me.”

“Yeah, well, then stop being so fucking non-introspective and try it for a while! You should know to do it now, anyway. But no, you’re still being dense and making me miserable and crazy and God, _why_ do I _like_ you so much?” Silva moaned, dragging his hands through his hair. He used his fingers to haul back his head so this time David got a glimpse of the bottom of his eye-whites. David was getting a better anatomy lesson than in optometry. “You’re such an asshole!”

“I know!” David snapped. For fuck’s sake, there was having a moment of epiphany and there was having a fucking stuck record on in the background.

Silva yanked down his head and just about mad-dogged David, with the bloodshot eyes and unfocused stare and thrown-back shoulders. “Then why don’t you just tell me to fuck off!”

“Because I don’t want you to fuck off!”

By then Silva was clearly working himself up to a grand old screaming roll and it took a second to derail that. His eyes stayed narrowed while he coughed and stuttered back his next shout, then slowly widened as his jerking shoulders went still. He looked hard at David, then abruptly dropped his gaze. He scuffed the floor with his left foot, biting his lip, before glancing back up at David. Finally he just slumped back against the table and raised weary eyes to meet David’s gaze. “Well, this is a great time for you to try being nice. This wasn’t what I meant a moment ago, you know. I just meant stop being stupid.”

“Yeah, but I’m not being nice. Or stupid. I’m saying—” David took a breath “—I’m saying I don’t want you to go.”

“David, really. Now you’re being an asshole again. _Stop_ being an asshole,” Silva said tiredly.

“Oh, for…what do I have to do around here? Do I have to go back to the fucking house and get stabbed by a floating knife or something? Is that the only way anybody ever believes what I say?” David threw up his hands, then stumbled because he’d been leaning on his hands on the counter behind him and hadn’t shifted his weight to compensate for the loss of support. But once he’d caught himself, he gave Silva his own tired stare because he was sicker than any of them of this ring-around-a-rosy bullshit and he should know. “I don’t want to tell you to fuck off because I don’t want you to fuck off. That simple.”

Silva got a look on his face like Raúl grading papers. They had spent a lot of time talking, David suddenly remembered. Too bad the influence hadn’t gone the other way. “No, it’s not. I’m _not_ stupid. I know you still have a thing for Mori, even if you’re mad at him right now, and now I guess you like Raúl too, and, and honestly, David, if this is about being lab partners I can still finish out the term with you. I can—I can do that, and then next term we can get different—”

“It’s not about being lab partners, you idiot. It’s about being fucking annoyed that Raúl is nice to you even when I know I should be, and I—whatever—with Raúl, and about thinking the damned house could’ve gotten you, you moron, because I had on holy water when I went in and it got me, and—oh, goddamn it.” David sucked at explaining. He just did things.

He threw out his foot and that got him the step he needed to take over to the other man, and then he got Silva by the arms and kissed the hell out of him.

Well, David tried to. Guardiola’s kitchen also had really slick floors, like maybe somebody who drank water all the time happened to spill a lot of it in there. So David smashed his mouth crookedly into Silva’s, Silva “mmphed!” and let go of the table, and they flopped onto the table. Silva’s knee crashed up into David’s hip as David’s mouth zipped off Silva’s and instead banged hard into the point of Silva’s chin. David’s teeth rattled and he grunted in pain.

Silva’s knee kept going, whacking against David’s waist and then back onto David’s hip, and then Silva’s foot got into the act, scraping at David’s calf like Silva thought that that was the floor or something. But when David tried to twist from it, some weird combination of his hand and Silva’s shirt ended up dragging him upwards. His forearms smacked into the table. His center of balance was over the table now and Silva kept trying to struggle _up_ , not down, hitching David’s body along with him and okay, they were staring at each other again. For the one second before David lost his balance and their mouths crashed into each other.

That wasn’t a kiss. That was painful and nearly tooth-breaking, and when David finally got himself back up, he could still feel the edge of Silva’s incisors in his lower lip. “Fuck, am I bleeding?”

“No, but my mouth feels like somebody hit it with a crowbar,” Silva muttered. He wriggled till he could get a hand up and rub at said body part. “ _Ow_.”

David winced. “Sorry.”

Silva stared funny at him, like the other man couldn’t make up his mind whether to laugh or just slap David. “I hate it when people pity me.”

“I’m not pitying you! I just—I fucked this up, okay?” David said. Okay, now he couldn’t make up his mind whether to shake Silva or get off and go away to hit something. “I like you! Jesus, can you just—”

A pair of hands shot up, grabbed his hair and pulled him down, holding him in place while Silva expertly fit his tongue into David’s still-open mouth and unlocked David’s knees. Half-swearing, half-kissing back, David fell and Silva hissed a little but just wrapped his legs around David’s waist and oh, wow, fuck, Silva could kiss. For a moment there David had shut his eyes and could see the backs of his eyelids, it was so fucking brilliant.

Then Silva peeled off, tweaked David’s hair till David stopped trying to get at his mouth and glared at him instead, and stared up at David. In Silva’s eyes were the delicate beginnings of a kind of happiness that made David’s stomach churn and David’s hands tighten on the other man.

“Asshole,” Silva said fondly. He ruffled David’s hair and David felt a weird hollow where the urge to kill people usually resided. Then Silva sobered up. “But wait, you’re still into Mori, and you definitely were macking on Raúl earlier—”

David opened his mouth.

“—you’re a really loud kisser, I heard the couch creaking all the way from here.” For a moment, Silva looked like Silva again. Then he went back to being weirdly…fuck, that was the same look Raúl had had. Just how often had they talked, anyway? Was this some kind of conspiracy? Was David getting paranoid? Wait, wasn’t David already paranoid? “So what’s up with that?” Silva asked, eyes narrowing.

“I’m…an asshole?”

* * *

Maybe introspection would’ve saved David some trouble, but to be honest, he couldn’t see that it’d do that much. Introspection just worked with what he knew, after all, and half of this shit David had had no idea was coming right up to when it kicked him in the face. Or pushed him off the table and insisted on having a fucking conference with Raúl right then and there. If he’d sat down with chin on fist and thought for a hundred years, he never would have come up with that one. Mostly because he didn’t see how consulting Raúl, who couldn’t even notice how Fernando had been adoring him from afar for years, would help him keep Silva’s pert little ass from constantly moving away from him. It was so fucking annoying how David didn’t notice details like that till _after_ he’d been told later, later.

“Because obviously, if there’s one place we’ve all been fucking up, it’s not sitting down and figuring out what’s happening with everybody,” Silva explained, trotting purposefully down the hall. “Look, if you’d told me you’d been seeing doors moving by themselves and shadows and stuff I _knew_ I wasn’t doing, I would have stopped because I would’ve known something else was happening. And Mori wouldn’t have thought it was all about screwing Raúl. And then you wouldn’t have had to lie about a gas leak and maybe you wouldn’t have screwed Raúl in the first pl—”

David grabbed Silva, slapped a hand over the other man’s mouth and dragged them against the wall just that inarticulate but palpably desperate moan crested. They both tensed up; David took his hand away after a moment and Silva seized his wrist, holding it back as they listened intently. Guardiola had conveniently had all that holy stuff on hand, and why would he if he hadn’t maybe used it at some point?

Then again, ghosts probably didn’t break into a stream of hoarse curses mixed with begging to get on with it already.

“Is that Mori’s voice?” Silva hissed. Then he twisted out of David’s grip and tiptoe-hurried down the hall to the guest room.

Before David could hiss at him to get his ass back here, Silva had his hand on the door and was going to barge right in, like that had worked for any of them so far—no, Silva wasn’t barging in. He’d taken his hand off the knob and put it flat against the door, and had just given the door a little tap. The hinges didn’t creak but that bright line between the door and the jamb got a little thicker.

“Goddamn it, Raúl, I _can’t_ —” So rough David could barely make out the words, breaking with frustration, and at the very tail-end of it, lifting up in a whine that curled between David’s legs and licked the underside of his cock.

“You’ll have to,” Raúl answered implacably, as crisp and clear and curt as Fernando was slurring and uneven, and Jesus but that was like running the edge of a fingernail down David’s spine.

David wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t get it. They were fucking, and arguing, and doing both at once and as much as Raúl got up in David’s craw, David knew Fernando hadn’t walked blind into it. The sensible, considerate, smart thing to do would’ve been to go back to the kitchen and wait till they’d worked it all out between themselves.

“That was my foot,” Silva hiss-mumbled, but he hitched forward anyway to accommodate David. He stuck his shoulder into the jamb to keep from falling into the door and interrupting.

His head was still in the way. After taking his foot off Silva’s heel and shoving it sideways against the wall, David grabbed the jamb himself and leaned up as far as he could. He got a glimpse of some dark hair, but couldn’t hold the pose and nearly crashed down just as Fernando cried out like somebody had taken a hot poker to his feet. A little gasp burst from Silva at the end. Then Silva reached back and grabbed at David, his fingers scrabbling over David’s thigh before coming up to catch a belt-loop on David’s jeans.

“ _Sssh_.” Silva yanked hard at the belt-loop.

If that was supposed to be a reprimand, it fucking sucked. It made David fall onto Silva, one arm crashing off Silva’s shoulder down his side while the other desperately hooked over Silva’s neck, and then both of them were trying not to grit their teeth too loud. Silva’s nails scraped on the jamb as he fought to stay up without reaching for the door; David couldn’t get his balance back by moving his feet away from Silva’s and finally just shoved them in between Silva’s feet, and got a good handful of Silva’s shirt with his left hand while he was at it.

At least it got Silva to bend a bit and David finally had a good vi—oh, Mary fucking Mother of God. Fernando. Fernando on the floor, his arms up over his head so the tendons in them were just about popping out of the skin. Fernando on the floor with his shirt off and his head back and the muscles in his throat were flexing up and down, up and down, and then he was clenching his teeth with his lips pulled back from them in some kind of agony that should make David feel horrified or worried or fuck, at least wanting to strangle Raúl. But no, not really. David just wanted to keep looking.

No shirt. A lot of bare chest and then there were hands across the belly, a little darker than it, old gold on white-gold, and they moved and Raúl was bending over Fernando, his lips wrapping around one dark nipple so David could fucking _see_ the nipple tighten up under them. Then Raúl’s shirt flapped in the way and David wanted to kill that, all right. But Raúl’s shirt was in the way because he was straddling Fernando, not Fernando’s waist but lower, right—Raúl rocked his hips, pulling up so his bare thighs showed under his shirt-tails, and Fernando shuddered all over. Fernando was still wearing his _jeans_ , fuck, barefoot, fuck fuck _fuck ow._

Silva didn’t apologize for biting David. He didn’t even stop. He just whimpered, like he was the one with tiny sharp teeth in his upper arm, and kept chewing. His fingers snaked down over David’s wrist, pinning it to his belly as he gnawed on David’s bicep and David had to swallow his pained hiss so fucking hard he felt his throat snap on him.

“I’m not helpless,” Raúl said. Muttered. Fuck, he sounded so much less like a prick when he was sitting on Fernando’s prick. “I can take care of myself. I can have a goddamn fuck with Villa and it can be consensual and I don’t need you to save me from that.”

“God, _Raúl_ ,” Fernando moaned, twisting. He dragged his nipple right out of Raúl’s mouth, though Raúl had teeth—the weird syncing between him and Silva again, what the hell oh David didn’t care—and David fucking saw the brown flesh stretch before the nipple’s tip popped out and Fernando moaned again, arching so hard nothing between his shoulderblades and his ass was touching the ground. “Jesus. Okay. _Okay_. I’m _sorry_.”

David smashed his mouth into the back of Silva’s head to keep from screaming—screaming—just plain screaming. He didn’t have the brain cells free to figure out what. They were all busy just trying to figure out why his cock was trying to merge with his fly—because Silva was grinding his ass into David and David’s other arm, the non-chewtoy one, was pressing against Silva’s shoulder in time—and why that was a bad thing—because now he really needed to yell. Or maybe just breathe. He dug his fingertips into Silva’s belly and tried to breathe through Silva’s skull. Stupid idea. Silva crushed the hell out of David’s wrist and slid his other hand way back to grab David’s right buttock and their bodies shifted so David’s cock fit in a different, snugger, better way into the crease of Silva’s ass. Probably a stupid idea too, but David couldn’t really do anything about it.

Raúl snorted and put his hand on Fernando’s chest, his fingers all splayed, and he looked at Fernando and Fernando looked blearily up at him, and then Raúl just dragged his nails down Fernando’s side. He wasn’t doing it that hard—the reddish scrapes they left broke repeatedly when Raúl’s nails skipped off Fernando’s ribs—but Fernando whipped back like he was being, well, whipped, and Raúl just kept staring at him, deadly serious, not even a hint that he was having fun and Jesus, David had to tear his eyes off Raúl’s face before he went and admitted he thought that that was fucking _hot_.

“Jesus, that’s sexy,” Silva shivered, doing it for David. He pushed his head back, bumping it into David’s nose, chin, then let out a long, low, exhale. He started to sag and he couldn’t fucking do that, he was holding David up, so David grabbed him but David’s hand kind of slipped or hell, maybe was pushed—he was not underestimating Silva now—and now they were holding hands and holding Silva’s crotch too, and Silva was doing this fucking wiggle that was making it really hard for David to concentrate. “ _Shit_.”

So Raúl finally leaned back and Fernando tried to sit up, but he couldn’t because he had this white stuff all wrapped around his arms, going under his head, and that was his shirt. He had his hands knotted up in his shirt. David shoved his head down and bit the nearest thing, which was some bit of flesh near Silva’s ear, and Silva squirmed and scratched around David’s ass a bit before his fingers suddenly went between David’s waistband and buttock. Then Silva was squirming and kneading David’s ass, and David was doing God knew what to Silva’s cock and hand, and for the love of God, if David could’ve fucked Silva through their jeans right then, he would’ve. He was so fucking cramped in his and Silva’s ass just kept rolling over it, nice pressure but always giving up too soon, not hot enough even though the sweat was dripping down David’s nose and once Silva jerked because some drops had hit his ear.

And now Raúl had put his hands back on Fernando’s waist and he was starting to lose that cool, focused look, was starting to get sweaty and to breathe hard, the pristine saint getting dirty with the rest of them and it looked goddamn _good_ on him. He got frustrated with the way Fernando was haphazardly thrusting up and grabbed at Fernando’s jeans, pulling them up and apart so David could just glimpse Fernando’s prick between the dark coarse hair and Raúl’s white shirt and then up to Raúl’s face, his eyes finally wide and his mouth just as open as Fernando’s, sucking down the air. Raúl started to wilt forward as Fernando’s movements got stronger, more purposeful, getting that they weren’t teasing anymore and Raúl was going to—Raúl was—Raúl jerked out his head and squeezed shut his eyes and held very very still for a moment.

David bit Silva again, somehow finding a trace of annoyance amid all his and Silva’s own frantic grinding. What, that was it?

No. That was just the prelude. Raúl started to sit up like it was over, but then he whipped forward and fell onto Fernando and went to pieces, shouting hoarsely, twitching his legs, clawing hand over hand at the floor like he was trying to climb up Fernando. There was this brutal tearing noise and suddenly Fernando had his arm out, part of his shirt still wrapped around it, and then he’d rolled them over and was eating Raúl’s mouth like it was manna from heaven and David said to hell with hiding. He needed to fucking come. He twisted around, banging the door open in the process, shoved Silva up against the jamb and with a couple sharp, hard jerks, the pressure in his groin finally released and he was slumping over as sticky come squeezed between his thigh and his jeans and started to cool.

“What the hell—David.”

“David?”

“ _David_ ,” Silva moaned, sounding disappointed.

Disappointed? David blinked a few times. Realized he was being cowlike and banged his head against the doorframe, then levered himself off to have a look. Still gasping, Silva twisted around and gave David a look like he’d run over Silva’s pet cat and then stepped on Silva’s foot while handing it over to him. David blinked again, resisted the urge to bang his head into Silva’s head, and happened to look down. “The hell? That wasn’t—”

“Oh, well, it’s not like I wanted the first time to just be rubbing off against somebody else’s door,” Silva said after a moment. He breathed in deep a couple times, then grabbed David’s arm and dragged him into the room.

The door shut. David fell. Those feet of Silva’s were really starting to get on David’s nerves, what with how they were always managing to poke him into dramatically embarrassing falls in front of other people.

Then David was sprawled on his back on the floor, except for his head which was resting on somebody’s…arm. He started to look up, but Silva sat on him and that distracted him. But Silva was just getting settling, pushing his butt into David’s groin and squishing David’s only half-softened cock into all that come that was really fucking gross now, so David tried looking up again. Of course, his head was on Raúl’s arm and Raúl looked like he was too polite to be mean about it.

“David,” Fernando said again. Then he winced and tried a little more up and to the right. “Silva. So…listen, Raúl and I were sort of…”

“Having really really hot make-up sex, yes, we saw and thank _you_.” Silva smiled brightly, like he was drunk but Guardiola didn’t have a drop of alcohol in the house so that couldn’t be what was putting the infernal chirp in Silva’s voice. Then Silva switched off the smile and looked pragmatically at Fernando. “But we really need to talk now. That’s why I’m sitting on David so he can’t storm off like usual.”

“Why n—and I’m still mad at you! You fucked with me with your stupid tape recorder, too!” Fernando barked, going from confused to flinty-eyed in seconds.

A couple blinks, and then Silva’s shoulders slumped and his face crumpled. He looked down and fiddled with David’s shirt. “And I’m really sorry, I know it was dumb and I know you—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Fernando, you only heard his thumps once and I think stuffing me in a closet was worse, since he didn’t know anything worse than a practical joke was going on when he did it,” Raúl said, for once the impatient one. He ignored Fernando’s surprised hurt look and dragged his arm out—not the one David was using—so he could prop himself up on it. “Talk about what?”

It took a moment for Silva to recover and answer, and it wasn’t because the man was shocked at who was helping him out. He really did feel awful about his whole prank, chirping aside. Even when he did speak, he was a lot quieter and less enthusiastic. “Oh, about…well, you know, David still…well, he and I made up and I guess he doesn’t want me to go—”

“No, I don’t,” David put in. He still felt like he had totally lost control of the situation. Actually, that had happened back in the kitchen and he’d never gotten it back: it’d just been one long slide on Guardiola’s slick floors to here.

“—so I’m definitely holding him to that, but he also still thinks you’re hot and Raúl’s hot, so that’s kind of awkward.” Silva paused to think. “Though I think so too—um, okay, I haven’t really gotten to know you, Mori, but since we’re talking, I should probably admit that I started hanging out with Raúl to make David jealous but now I like him a bit too. So I dunno, it’s not that awkward for me, but is it for you?”

They all looked at Silva for a bit. He fidgeted some more with David’s shirt but managed to keep up his chin and meet them squarely on.

Fernando’s eyes flicked down Silva. “And you’re still hard. Where the hell did David find you? A—”

“Don’t be an asshole now,” Silva said a touch too sharply. He absently shifted on David and it tugged David’s jeans so David was reminded that he had come drying in them. “Look, I’ve been drooling over David for the better part of two semesters. I’ve had to cover up so many inconvenient hard-ons I can’t even—not to mention I’ve spent way, way too much time figuring out how I’d do this even though I knew I’d never get to.”

“Yeah, okay, but they’ve been idiots about each other for years and they’ve been— _idiots_ ,” David grunted. That fucking come. Fine, if it was going to be surreal, he was at least going to be comfortable. He pushed at Silva’s thigh till he could get a hand under the other man, then yanked open his fly and began to wriggle out of his jeans. “I think you’re a lot brighter than them about this sort of thing, though.”

Silva blinked, then beamed so for a moment David felt weirdly squishy inside. Fernando smacked David in the back of the head. “I know you’re an asshole, but you can stop being a jerk now or else…”

He abruptly trailed off. When David turned around, he found Raúl staring hard at Fernando and Fernando swallowing slowly and looking very, very glad he’d shut up in time. But he’d smacked David in the head. “Is this about the weird talk _we_ had? Where you were all, I have a spiky head and I can screw Raúl and screw you so long as I don’t keep you from Raúl?”

“You already talked about this?” Silva yelped.

“You told him what?” Raúl yelped.

Fernando looked like he wanted to smack David across the room and like he wanted to melt into the carpet. “I was rattled! We’d just run into the woman ghost, and—and I didn’t mean it like that! I’m sorry! I _don’t_ know how to do this.”

“Well, I don’t either but at least I knew to wait till we were all in the room,” Silva said sharply. He looked at Fernando and Fernando winced, and okay, completely inappropriate but there was something kind of hot about Fernando getting told off by short people.

That probably said something deep and insightful about David, but David wasn’t doing the introspective thing right now. He was too busy just trying to keep up with the other-people thing and wait. “Well, not really. They were messing around and we were outside and—”

“And that was the sex, I meant the talking right now and cut me some slack, okay? I’m really stressed right now because we have classes and the house, and I’m not really sure if I even have you and you didn’t even get me _off_.” Silva raked his hand back through his hair, his odd composure suddenly gone. “Honestly.”

“I’m sor—but how didn’t you? I mean—they were—and—”

“David, I know you can’t help it, but I hope you realize criticizing all the time without offering an alternative isn’t that helpful,” Raúl said, like he was delivering a lecture on the workings of the universe.

Actually, he was leaning over and putting his hands around Silva’s face, and Silva’s eyes went wide for one second. Then it was like Silva got it, except what was he getting when he and Raúl were sucking face with Silva’s hands going to Raúl’s shoulders, and Raúl kind of petting Silva’s throat, and David was staring. David was staring and had his hand inside his jeans because he’d been trying to get the come-soaked denim off his skin, but now he was feeling himself up and not wanting to break Raúl’s neck. It was weird. It was weird and hot and just how was he supposed to think in a straight line when this shit kept happening to him? He was fucking human, after all.

David wasn’t actually complaining about this time. He just sounded like it.

Raúl and Silva ended it with a wet pop that made David jump and a little sharp intake of breath come from Fernando’s direction. And Raúl’s shoulders stiffen, but they loosened up once Raúl looked around. “Oh, thank God. You two aren’t getting into another pissing contest.”

“I—no—but you—wait, what the hell is going on?” Fernando stuttered. “Besides, that was Silva, not David.”

Silva’s brows went down and he got all pursed-mouthed, like he wasn’t sure if he needed to smack Fernando for that one. Then he eeped and stared, and disappeared behind Raúl who apparently had decided he was just making out with everybody. Though David’s cock insisted on pointing out that Raúl was just as good on the floor as he was on a couch.

A moment later, Raúl checked around again and nodded, like he had it all worked out. “Well, that didn’t get me in a closet either. Good. Listen. I’m this close to losing my sanity so I can’t be thinking this through very well. But I need things—things _here_ to calm down, so I can think through what I’m doing with my house, and I need it to calm down now and if it takes sleeping with everybody, okay.”

“Oh, so it’s all about your martyr issues,” David blurted out. “Besides, it’s not just you sleeping with everybody, you narcissist.”

Raúl looked at him. Then Raúl hit him on the head.

“Ow! Would everybody just _stop that_? I’m just saying that—that—you know what, fuck it. Whenever I try to point something out, you all don’t listen anyway so you can work it out and don’t fucking blame me, you—” And somehow David ended up with Silva in his hands. He was pretty sure he’d meant to grab Raúl.

“Are you—” Silva started.

David gave up on talking and pushed Silva over onto somebody. He didn’t stop to look at who it was, but got Silva breathless in one kiss and moaning in the next, because damn it, he’d just realized Silva was asking if he was all right, not asking if he was an asshole. And maybe this was a mess and David didn’t have any bright ideas for getting them out of it, but at least he could take care of this and _okay_ , Silva had gotten into it now. Tongue-first. Squirming. Rubbing up against David’s leg, which wasn’t actually that effective because David’s jeans were bunched around his thighs now and somebody was talking about his ass and whatever, he shoved it out and let them look at it.

But the jeans were annoying. David tried to reach back to get them, but just then Silva shoved his hands up under David’s shirt and David’s hand took a detour down to somebody’s knee. He tried again and got a buttock, which jerked so David lost his balance. But he kept his mouth glued to Silva’s neck, anyway, and Silva was running his hands up and down David’s back in a surprisingly tingly way, and David still had his jeans on. He squeezed the buttock in frustration and Fernando hissed. Somebody slapped at David’s elbow, then grabbed his sleeve when he ignored it in favor of working a point just under Silva’s jaw.

“David, you prick…” Fernando moved again and this time he hit Silva in the back of the head or something because Silva made a pained noise, his hands suddenly clutching at David’s shoulders. “Shit. Sorry.”

“ _Ow_ ,” Silva said.

Something made David look up and he saw Silva giving the most pitiful look in the world at Fernando, who wiggled uncomfortably and glanced off to the side before awkwardly touching the side of Silva’s face. Silva promptly lost the pitiful look and whipped his head around, getting Fernando’s thumb in his mouth and Fernando’s eyes darkened. He watched Silva’s tongue flick around his knuckle, then grinned slightly, appreciatively, and bent over.

David made a noise. Fernando paused and looked at him, and then very deliberately slid his thumb over, pulling Silva’s lips open so David could see Fernando’s tongue going into them. Then Fernando let his thumb pop out and swept it across Silva’s cheek, leaving a gleaming trail of spit and David couldn’t breathe, looking at it, but even so, he wanted to smack Fernando’s head.

That he didn’t was Raúl’s fault, because Raúl decided to pitch in just then by yanking David’s jeans down to his knees. Damn near yanked David off Silva in the process and David wasn’t having that; he clamped his hands around Silva’s arms and brought his head down so his mouth skimmed across Silva’s chest along with the pulling. When Raúl knocked it off, David clawed his way back up to lick at Silva’s neck; Silva managed to get a moan out through the seal of Fernando’s mouth over his own. His hands scraped at the tops of David’s shoulders.

Another something nudged insistently at David’s side, then pressed between him and Silva. He looked up, but Fernando had both hands firmly in Silva’s hair, so that left…he looked down and Raúl was just pushing Silva’s jeans down his legs. Raúl lifted his head, met David’s stare and sighed. “If it’s about taking care of that, it’d help if—”

“Stop telling me what’s going to _help_. You know it’s fucking annoying when somebody’s right all the time, right?” David hissed. He spared a hand to hook Raúl under the arm, then dragged him over onto Silva and kissed him hard, forcing his head back into Silva’s chest. For a moment Raúl resisted, but then his hand was between David’s legs. Jesus, the man overthought as much as David underthought.

So they’d balance out, flitted through David’s brain, and he went still. Then he shrugged it off, grimacing, because Silva had just crushed his newly-freed prick against David’s thigh and _slid_ up, and David was…was…frustrated that he couldn’t keep Raúl’s hand on his cock and reach around to get at Silva’s cock. The anatomy just didn’t work out. Damn it, all those med classes and no fucking answer was coming to mind.

He raised his head, thinking he’d take a look and figure it out, and promptly remembered he was fucking terrible at that when he got stuck on Fernando cradling Silva’s suckling mouth against his collarbone. He only got interrupted when Raúl moved, taking away the obstacle and the fingers on David’s cock; David looked down, then got his hand on Silva’s hip before anything else could distract him. Like, say, Raúl licking up his thigh, nibbling off half-dried come and that shouldn’t be hot, David fucking knew what was in semen but David was gasping and bucking and had his other hand suddenly knotted in Raúl’s hair.

Silva. Fuck. David stared blurrily about and a cock that didn’t belong to him or Silva came into view, with a hand wrapped around it, like his mind was making his daydreams real. Except this was already real, this was Fernando’s cock and Silva was working his fingers around it, up and down it, over the head and wait, either Fernando had pinkish come or they’d gotten lotion from somewhere. Oh, right, fucking Raúl earlier and David ended up moaning just at the memory.

It was hard to think. Raúl had worked his way up to David’s balls. Lotion. Right. David reached out and it seemed like he was moving just as slowly as when the house had gotten him, but fuck the house, this wasn’t the house and if it had been, David would burn the whole fucking place down before he let it stop this.

David went for Fernando’s cock but missed, hitting the floor instead. Which was okay, because there was a half-crushed bottle of lotion there and the stuff got all over his hand as he shoved it away. Whatever, this would wor—David arched, cursing, and Raúl just flicked his tongue again against the underside of David’s prick, fucking getting David back for something and fucking good at it. Lotion. Silva. Thigh. David fumbled his fingers in between Silva’s legs and Silva ahh’ed and _moved_ , damn it, which didn’t help.

Silva kept moving, wriggling around till David finally let Silva roll over onto his belly, face smushed up into Fernando’s chest, so David could hold his hip down. Then Silva couldn’t go anywhere. It still was strangely hard to figure out what went where when. At some point Raúl had moved up to suck on just the head of David’s cock. That probably had a lot to do with it.

Much as David hated it, he finally just pulled away from Raúl and flopped onto Silva, who was shuddering madly from something Fernando was doing and they were so fucking uncoordinated so it was a fucking miracle when David finally hitched up and instead of his prick sliding off on Silva’s ass, it went _in_. Jesus. Miracle. David was seeing God already. And God looked like Fernan—wait.

Fernando didn’t. He just went and kissed David, like David wasn’t trying to _do_ something here, like fuck Silva, and Silva was still making muffled noises so somebody else was kissing him. Raúl, David guessed, and nearly bit Fernando’s tongue imagining that. That would’ve been a fucking shame because Fernando needed that to do things that made David flail and God knew how that felt to Silva but Silva was still moaning so maybe it wasn’t that bad. It definitely wasn’t for David. He was seeing flashes of white and he really did need to bite something but he couldn’t bite Fernando so he just fucked Silva harder, digging his nails into Silva’s hips, and Silva suddenly jerked viciously a few times, keening. Fucking _now_? David was just—just barely starting to see that fucking white crest coming at him, like a slap to the face—

—he rocked back hard, and lost his grip on Silva and fell even harder. Holy God. This was the best fuck-up David had ever made.

* * *

It wasn’t quite the best afterglow. Four people meant a lot more limbs to untangle, but even so, David was pretty sure he’d gotten more than his fair share of elbows. And then there was a line for the shower, because just trying to scrub off sweat and spit and semen with a wet hunk of toilet-paper was a great way to get chapped skin in bad places, and a lot of awkward moments because what the hell were you supposed to say to each other? Great, we’re not so fucking messed up that we can’t have crazy foursome sex when we’re supposed to be thinking about getting rid of ghosts?

“I know, but—” Raúl paused, stared hard at the stack of papers in front of him, and then shoved it all onto the coffeetable. Then he got off the couch and eased himself down onto one of the airbeds by it, occasionally wincing. “You know what? I’m tired. I’ll think about it tomorrow, after I hear what Figo has to say.”

Fernando just sat on the actual bed and looked exasperated. “David, do you have _no_ filter?”

“I’m going with Raúl on this one,” Silva mumbled, sort of limping by them. He bent over and put his hands on the airbed by Raúl, then gradually got onto his hands and knees. After a moment, he reached out and snagged the folded up quilt at the end, flipped it open, and got under it. Somehow this meant he ended up snuggling against Raúl, who blinked a couple times before putting his head back on his pillow. “We’re not killing each other. Tomorrow we can work on the whole not-insulting each other thing. And the ghost thing. You two can keep working on that if you want, but I just got fucked silly and I wanna enjoy it and get some sleep, okay?”

David rumpled his hand over his face and into his twice-showered hair. He wanted to argue just on principle, but he couldn’t really figure out what principle that was. And okay, maybe he was sort of proud about being a good fuck. He was a _stupid_ asshole sometimes.

He was also tired. With a shrug, David hunted up another pillow and blanket, then moved the last airbed around till it was on Silva’s other side. He laid down and Silva’s arm immediately flopped onto his chest; David looked at it, then looked at Silva, who was not asleep even if his eyes were shut and he was breathing regular, slow, shallow breaths. Silva just plain couldn’t be trusted. For some idiotic reason, David wanted to smile about that.

“Why is everyone on the floor?” Fernando asked after a couple minutes had passed. “There is a bed.” Creaking springs. “It’s nice.”

“Mori,” Raúl muttered, “Next time I want David to fuck you just so you’ll know it’s hard to move that far with a sore ass.”

Fernando choked, cleared his throat and was quiet. The lights clicked off, and after a few more minutes, David heard the sound of covers being pulled off the bed. He raised his head, looked over the other two men on the airbeds, and had just enough time to see where this was going and brace himself before Fernando came over to set himself up against Raúl, pushing Silva mostly onto David. Silva grunted, wriggled and resettled quickly, with his head tucked into the crook of David’s neck. Raúl ended up smushed against David but took longer to relax, even though Fernando fell asleep fast and then was noisily nuzzling Raúl’s shoulder. And he didn’t have Fernando’s hand on him because that was stretched all the way to David’s stomach.

Eventually Raúl’s breathing began to slow. Then his head fell against David’s shoulder just as David looked over to check, and David was pretty fucking stuck. It wasn’t that bad, actually. Just as long as he didn’t need to take a piss in the middle of the night, David thought, and closed his eyes.

* * *

An uncomfortable pressure in David’s nether regions slowly dragged him out of a warm, dark, nice place and into the reality of cramped limbs and hair stuffed up his nose and something like a fucking rock wedged into the small of his back. He grunted and the rock attempted to smash into his spine, then ground off his left hip as a body shifted next to and over him. Which made the body in front of and half-under him move, and then made the body that was just all over him squirm, and at that point David just said to hell with it and shoved his head up towards the light.

He broke free enough to get the hair out of his nose and promptly sneezed. It took him another couple seconds to work out a hand to wipe off his face, and then he nearly slid right back into the tangle because somebody had a morning happy and had just smushed it between his buttocks. That uncomfortable pressure in David’s groin became frustrating as well. His poor cock didn’t know what it wanted to do, stay or run for the toilet.

“Mpfhurgle,” said Silva’s voice somewhere around David’s shoulder. Then Silva twisted, breathed out noisily and flopped back his head so David could see straight into his mouth to the back, where that little bit of flesh at the top of the throat was vibrating with a snore. Which was damn loud.

David frowned and looked around, but no, it really was coming from Silva. Snorting, David absently ruffled Silva’s hair and then lurched more of himself over the other man, trying to get to the edge of the bed. But something had his left leg pinned down and it was really emphatic about it, to the point of putting that rock into David’s arm. No, wait, it was a different rock. A lot smaller and narrower and that was Raúl’s nose, and David realized that about a second before he would’ve elbowed it out of the way. 

To be honest, David thought about doing that anyway, but finally just lifted his arm and rotated it up and over like he was swimming. If he stretched as far as his body could stand, he could just get his hand down on a free patch of mattress. His fingertips slipped off as Raúl shifted, his weight dragging David back, but David gritted his teeth and threw himself forward—and okay, overdid it. He popped out too fast and planted his face in the mattress, Raúl went rolling in the other direction and David’s knees had the vague impression that Silva got a bit squished.

“Ow!” Okay, a lot squished.

“Mother of—” The thumping on Raúl’s end stopped and was replaced with hard, fast breathing. Then that slowed. “David?”

Was still getting his face out of the mattress. It took that long because he still had a foot stuck under somebody and was trying to be less of an asshole and not kick them. “Wha?”

“Never mind,” Raúl muttered, like he had expected as much. Really, why did David bother?

There was an explosion of snuffling and rustling, capped by a forceful snort. “What?” Fernando said.

They’d all barely woken up and it was already getting silly. David got his arms under himself, then pushed up, determined to just stop this shit before it went…went…okay, so last time it’d gone to orgy-time and Jesus _God_ that had really happened, but he knew better than to expect that again. More likely was another smack to his head. Or feet at the end of the mattress.

For a moment David looked at them: black shoes, so shiny he could see his reflection in them. His hair was half-crushed to his head and he had bleary eyes and a dumb-looking expression. Wincing, David looked up.

This man was standing there and just—he was making a fucking _video_. With a video camera and everything and he was taping David as David worked his mouth a couple times, just really not believing this. He was…David put out a finger and tapped a shoe. He was solid.

“Oh, go back to what you were doing,” the man said. “Don’t mind me. I’m just looking for residue in your auras.”

He was a condescending _prick_. David scooted the hell away from him, then flinched as it sounded like a bull had run into a clothesline behind him. He started to turn, only to have to yank his arm as Silva backed into him. Silva started, then grabbed David’s arm to keep from falling backward onto David. Then Silva twisted around and stared up at the stranger. “Who are you and what—what are—how’d you get in here?” Silva said, half-hissing and half barking.

“He’s Figo and he can get out of here, _then_ explain,” Fernando snarled. When David looked back, Fernando was sitting ramrod straight and glowering at Figo while trying hard to hold down a squirming quilt-covered lump. Then Fernando’s eyes went to Figo’s hand. “What is that? Is that a camera? What are you doing, you perv—”

“Mori, it’s grand to see you again too.” Figo lowered the video camera and smiled. It wasn’t friendly, really, but it was enjoying itself and didn’t really give a fuck what Fernando thought. “Morning, Raúl,” Figo said to the lump. “Pep says you have a ghost problem.”

The lump finally wriggled away from Fernando, then burst open before Fernando could grab it. A disheveled, tight-lipped Raúl glanced at Fernando, glanced at Figo and then stared hard at Fernando while Fernando belatedly realized that stuffing Raúl under the sheets was a lot like stuffing Raúl in a closet. Then Raúl looked back at Figo, but he was still so annoyed, messing with his hair and his shirt-collar, that he didn’t seem to notice that Figo was blatantly checking him out. Eyes lingering on all the flesh Raúl’s half-buttoned shirt was showing, on the messy curls and okay, maybe stuffing Raúl under a quilt was the lesser of two evils.

“Oh, right. I, ah, I seem to.” Raúl grimaced and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean, I do. I clearly do, even though I know that sounds unbelievable—”

“Oh, no, I believe you,” Figo said, casually stepping onto the mattress by David. He was lucky he’d gone to the side where Silva was blocking David’s reach. “I can see it all over your auras.”

At least Raúl had the sense to frown at that, and then to…do his stupid blinking thing when he noticed the camera. He pursed his lips, then looked up at Figo again.

“That’s helpful sometimes in detection but since I think we’re beyond that at this point, we should probably talk exorcisms.” Then Figo raised his brows, like they were all just plain slow and he hadn’t been taking advantage of their sleeping-to-sleepy states to do a bunch of ogling. If this was the kind of person Guardiola called a friend, David was going to have to rethink him, too. And all those water bottles. “Raúl, I did mention that some point that I’m a paranormal investigator, right?”

“I thought you said private investigator. But I might have heard wrong. That was when we were celebrating Pep’s birthday, and you ordered the oversize champagne bottle, I think,” Raúl said after a moment. He was still frowning but not at Figo and God, he was buying the whole package. Sometimes David didn’t dislike Raúl—he just wanted to take the man by the shoulders and shake him hard.

Figo shrugged. “Well, I don’t recall either. But anyway, I think I can help, but I’ll need more details.” He paused and looked way, way too hard at Raúl, then smiled with entirely too much amusement. “I’ll go bother Pep in the kitchen and let you dress, then.”

With that, Figo turned on his heel and strode out of the room in his shiny black shoes and slick dark suit and creepy video camera. Raúl half-glanced over a shoulder after him, then turned forward and rubbed hard at his eyes with both hands.

“Paranormal investigator? Like that one show we watched?” Silva said, pulling on David’s arm.

“I don’t buy it,” David snorted.

Fernando nodded vigorously. “He’s _always_ like that. Coming in and acting like he knows everything, and like hell he doesn’t recall. He did say he was a private investigator. Okay, he also said he worked really unusual cases but then the champagne showed up and…”

While Fernando had been ranting away, Raúl had stopped rubbing his eyes and raised his head to stare at Fernando. Lips compressed, shoulders stiff, arms not crossed over his chest but definitely held in close to his sides. When Fernando finally noticed that something was wrong, he tried making his eyes big and sorry but Raúl just narrowed his eyes. “Mori.”

“I’m sorry, but Figo just gets on—” Fernando stopped, then put his hand over his face “—okay, no, forget that. I’m just sorry. I’m trying. I really am.”

Raúl opened his mouth, then shut it. Then he sighed and leaned over to put his hands on the mattress. He got slowly up, in this awkward crablike fashion with his knees sticking out at funny angles, and then redirected himself to the bathroom. “I’m going to wash up, and then I’m going to hear what Figo has to say,” he said.

“But what if it’s a bunch of bullshit?” David asked. He didn’t feel bad when Raúl gave him a look, since he hadn’t helped toss a sheet over Raúl’s head. 

Besides, somebody had to say it. All the other crap aside, they did have a serious problem with those damn ghosts and if they were going to get out of Guardiola’s bedroom—which David was even more determined to do now, even if it’d gotten him laid and then some—then they’d better get whatever they tried right the first time around. Nobody had gotten badly hurt yet but it’d been close and suddenly, sitting on a stupid airbed with Fernando looking mopey and Silva watching curiously and Raúl just being pissed off, David was really aware of how close it’d been. And that he didn’t like it coming that close.

“Then we won’t do it. But we’re not going to know till we hear him out.” After a moment, when it looked like nobody else had an objection, Raúl resumed limping to the bathroom.

He shut the door a bit too hard behind him; Fernando hissed and started, then slumped and dragged his hand over the top of his head. Silva glanced his way, then hesitantly reached out a hand. He paused when Fernando looked at it, but Fernando didn’t do anything so Silva patted Fernando on the left bicep. “I think he’ll get over it. Besides, Figo _was_ eating Raúl up with his eyes,” Silva said sympathetically.

“I know! And just wait, when we’re talking, Figo’s going to be all over him. Touching his hair, putting an arm over his shoulders, all that…” As he trailed off, Fernando lifted his hands heavenward while rolling his head with his eye-roll, just so they couldn’t look at one part, see it was still and mistakenly think he was calm or anything. Then Fernando bit his lip and sighed, looking off into the distance and covering all stages of discontent. “Damn it. If Figo really does know how to get rid of those ghosts, we’ll have to put up with it. Him.”

David settled for just an eyeroll, which got his emotions across fine. “Maybe ‘we’ will, but I’m not fucking putting up with it. I didn’t go through all of this just to have some weirdo talking about auras confuse Raúl into Tantric sex or some shit like that.”

Silva pursed his lips a couple times, looking at David. “You mean, you didn’t bother to make me and Fernando mad by sexing up Raúl, fucking up the apology, nearly getting killed by the house, and then making me make everybody sit down and talk and um, fuck—” Silva’s sarcasm briefly wavered to let him blush “—just so you could put up with a guy who, omigod, flirts with Raúl? Who’s perfectly capable of laying out Mori flat?”

“Mother of God,” Fernando said after a moment, in an awed voice. “You’re brutal.”

“Um. No, usually I’m not like—everybody’s just been so frustrating lately!” Silva stammered, suddenly shrinking down. He wrapped an arm around himself and hunched his shoulders, staring into his lap. “Even I get fed up sometimes.”

“Sorry,” David said. He wanted to roll his eyes when Silva’s head shot up and Silva looked at him like David had grown two ears and a tail, but he didn’t. Because goddamn it, he was who he was and he wasn’t going to fucking bother with acting like an asshole or whatever other label people stuck on him. That was their label, he was him, and that was it. Right.

No, seriously, right. It was weird but he’d just been sitting there and still irritated at Figo and mad at everything else, plus feeling guilty because of what Silva had said, and suddenly it all cleared up. He got it. He fucking _got_ it, and no damn ghosts or men were going to pry that away from him. Now all he needed for a half-decent morning was to take a piss, and…

…and Raúl was hogging the bathroom. David rolled his eyes and stomped over to kick in the door. Yeah, he got it, but it was still a bunch of crap a lot of the time.

* * *

Guardiola finished handing out the water, all solicitous and smiley, then began to wander off away. “Does anyone want anything else?”

“Those fucking ghosts out of my house and for you to stick your tongue back in your own mouth where it belongs,” David said, slumping in his chair. He pointedly crossed his arms, keeping them as far from his bottle of water as possible, and looked hard at Figo.

“I have dry lips,” Figo said, shrugging. At least he had to close his mouth sometimes when he talked, instead of having his tongue hanging out all over the place while he watched Raúl fiddle with his collar. And why the man managed to look hungry instead of plain dumb like that was beyond David except for the fact that it made David like him even less. “So you have violent ghosts.”

Raúl had been looking narrowly at David for some reason, but now he opened his mouth…and tugged at his collar some more like he was missing his tie. When it was the weekend and that was why they were all calmly sitting at the table instead of running around bitching about their missed work and classes, and he really was that much of a stuffy prick sometimes. “Yes, and I’d like them to stop. Leave. However you do it.”

“Well, I can do that.” Figo picked up his bottle of water and twisted off the cap, then took a long drink. Then he put the bottle down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at them all, idly toying with the bottle-cap.

Silva seemed to be rapidly converting to the Figo-is-a-prick camp, given the way he sighed and rubbed the side of his nose. “Okay, so…”

And Figo _stared at them some more_ , as if he didn’t have the dark suit and video camera and supercilious expression to show them how know-it-all he was. “So it depends on how much carnage we’re thinking is acceptable. This sounds like an extreme case and extreme cases call for extreme measures,” he finally said.

Fernando had already been sitting up, staring hard at Figo, and but now he sat up even straighter, like his spine was a whip and it was going to send him across the table and straight into Figo’s annoyingly smug face. “What the hell are you talking about? Carnage? Nobody else is getting hurt, first of all.”

“Extreme cases are why you bring in a professional, so you don’t have to take the extreme measures,” David added. He slouched further so the curve of the chair’s back pushed his head into a tilt, letting him look side-long at Figo. “You know. Since you’re a pro. Aren’t you?”

“All right, look—” Raúl started.

“If you’re asking do I have some pretty diploma I’ve got framed somewhere, well, no. They don’t really have schools for this sort of thing. It’s more or less learn as you go, sink or swim.” Figo eyed David right back, spinning his bottle-cap under one fingertip. Then he stopped it with his thumb, which made the thing flick up and travel in a short arc to land perfectly on the bottle’s rim. Right-side down. And Figo didn’t even look. “I’m just trying to explain that they’ve probably been in there a while and have had time to establish themselves. They’re like any other homeowner.”

David snorted and unfolded one hand. He reached out, grabbed his water bottle and after flipping it on its side, sent it spinning across the table only to stop just short of the edge. Work as a line cook in enough cramped kitchens, learn a few tricks. “Except they’re dead and it’s not their fucking house anymore, and how do we get them out?”

“Oh, that. You exorcise them,” Figo said. Casual, straightforward, not even a blink, like David had asked him nicely.

“Which involves going back in there, and if it’s anything like the movies, everyone stands around in a circle while horrible things try to distract them. Yes?” Fernando was already leaning forward and pressing his hands down on the table. “ _No_. Look, Silva and I have had a couple things happen to us, but it’d been David and Raúl who they’ve really gone after and we can guess who they’ll be going after during one of those. Raúl’s ankle is already sprained and—”

“And it’s my house and my ankle and my ghosts!” Raúl snapped. At the same time his hand came down hard on the table, open-fingered.

The sharpness and loudness of the slap made them all start, with Silva nearly chipping some teeth as he shut his m—David tried to resist his suspicions, but the prickling wouldn’t go away and he looked. And Figo was still in the same position as before, with the same faintly bored look on his face when he wasn’t mentally stripping Raúl of clothing.

Wait, Raúl was still saying something. About his house and…David frowned, still warily watching Figo. “Yes, it’s your fucking house but we live there too and yes, it’s your fucking ankle but I like that damn ankle in one piece and—and they’re not your fucking ghosts, Raúl. They’re just there. Don’t get all possessive over something that’s going to hurt you. Where’s the sense in that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Raúl said meaningfully, after an equally meaningful pause.

David could see Figo’s mouth twitching and behind the man’s lips, his tongue just lying in wait, and he wanted to keep glaring it down but something about the way Raúl said that wouldn’t let him. Maybe it was the sense that Raúl was trying to melt the side of David’s face with his eyes.

Yeah, that was it. For a moment David stared back and tried to figure out what the hell he’d said now, only to get derailed by a long, low moan of exasperation. He looked at Silva, who’d put up his elbows on the table so he could bury his face in his hands and be a despairing little heap to Raúl’s left. “Oh, my God,” Silva mumbled. “Can we just talk about the ghosts right now?”

“Weren’t we?” David said.

“No,” came shooting from Fernando into the back of David’s head.

Figo grinned lazily. “Nope. And I know ghosts, so I think I’d k—”

From out of nowhere, or maybe just from picking through his fridge for the absolute perfect bottle of water, Guardiola showed up behind Figo and thwapped Figo on the head. Still looking like the perfect host, gazing inquiringly at the rest of them, while his hand just moved in a quick, sharp sideways motion. “Luís, can we get out of my kitchen at some point? I’m happy to host this discussion but I do have a lunch party later.”

“ _Ow_ ,” Figo answered, jerking his head down. He put his hand up to feel the spot, then took it off. Then he put it back as he craned around and gave Guardiola a wounded look like he was David. Like people hit him _half_ as often, with the way he licked his lips. “And a party? And I’m not invited?”

Guardiola looked down at him and something that actually resembled aggravation flicked over Guardiola’s face. “It’s to discuss the finer points of the implications of the latest harmonizing directive on telecommunications tariffs.” He resumed being serene about when Figo resumed looking like he didn’t mind a thing in the world because it was all amusing. “Which type of exorcism were you thinking about? The one that gets us in trouble with the Church or the one that just ruins my ties?”

“You have horribly ugly ones anyway.” Figo turned back around and pursed his lips a couple times, like that was going to help him look authoritative when they’d all just seen the head-smack. “Carnage isn’t necessarily bloody, you know. It can involve property damage.”

“Oh,” Fernando said, sounding more relaxed.

“Oh,” Raúl said, straightening up and looking more concerned. He pushed a strand of hair out of his face, then frowned and took down his hand to stare at it, and maybe at the bandages on it. So maybe, just maybe, he was having a sensible moment and thinking ruining the house wasn’t nearly as bad as breaking his neck. “I’m actually in the middle of renovating it right now.”

David tried not to. He really did. He’d gotten hit on the head plenty in the past couple hours—okay, he’d had wild amazing sex too, but then they’d all gone back to the sniping and it wasn’t getting them anywhere, including back to a horizontal surface large enough to accommodate all of them. So he pressed his lips together and shoved his hands under his legs and told himself the problem was Raúl, so only Raúl could do anything about it.

Who the hell was he kidding? Sure, it was about Raúl but like David had ever accepted the idea that he couldn’t do _anything_ about anything. Maybe he couldn’t do something right, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something. And that was what he did—he did…things.

Whatever. Anyway, David shoved back his chair and stomped around Figo and Guardiola so he could drag out Raúl’s chair, and when Raúl put up his hands to protest, David grabbed them. He used them to haul Raúl to his feet, then got a good hold on Raúl’s shirt. If he’d held onto the hands, then he could’ve lost his grip if Raúl had tried to hit him. But Raúl wasn’t about to go running out without his shirt in front of everybody—he missed just his fucking tie that much, shirtless must be agonizing for him and come to think of it, David hadn’t had sex or seen Raúl having sex without a shirt on yet. Shit, that wasn’t what David was supposed to be thinking about right now, and Raúl was being all snappy in David’s face, trying to shove David off.

David shook his head, blinked and cursed himself for it, and then decided he’d just take the shit for whatever Raúl had said that he’d missed. “Look, we’re exorcising the damn house and if it burns down the house, then that’s just how it goes.”

“If the house burns down then why are we exorcising it? Then nobody gets the house!” Raúl said despairingly, wringing his hands. He glanced up, down, anywhere he could get a pity-look. “I’ve put—”

“I know! I know, it’s your house and your money and your family and your honor whatever else, but you know what? It’s you! It’s you and I like you and not the fucking house, and if I have to, I’ll stuff you in another closet to keep them from killing you, you self-absorbed son of a bitch,” David snarled back. Goddamn it, Raúl kept doing that blinking thing and moving around thing so David couldn’t look into the man’s eyes. Well, Raúl wasn’t getting off that easy. “Maybe you’ll never have sex with me again, but it’s about you, not about sex. Or the house. Or…look, it’s about you. _Jesus_.”

Raúl continued to wobble around, looking oddly queasy. Then something slapped at David’s arm, and just as David realized that that had been Raúl’s hand, somebody tackled David around the waist, ripping him off Raúl and sending him over sideways. Because Raúl had been trying to get David to stop David from shaking him so hard, and that was why Raúl was all jittery. And that was David’s skull connecting with the floor.

* * *

It was black, then kind of blue and blurry, and then it was a bunch of faces looking down at David with varying expressions of concerned exasperation. Silva looked the most guilty, kneeling right by David’s head, which he was cradling in his hands. “David, are you okay? I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you’d tip over like that, I just wanted to get you off Raúl before he threw up.”

Fernando’s face had been worried, but it’d quickly gone back to irritated. He was squatting with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands dangling over David’s right arm. “You nearly shook his head off, David.”

“Well, he’s annoying,” David said.

Fernando’s hand twitched and Silva jerked up his head to glare at him, like Silva had some sixth sense that detected incipient head-slaps. One look at Fernando’s thighs, long and perfect and straining his jeans as he crouched there, was enough to make David grit his teeth instead of punch the man, but David had to admit he really, really was kicking himself for not buying Silva more coffees and pushing him up against a wall. Well, he wasn’t that stupid now. Not really.

He was and he’d just proved it by making Silva tackle him in the first place, said Raúl’s look. Raúl was bent over David on Silva’s other side and his hands were on David’s collar, like now he needed a tie on David too. Or okay, maybe like he was loosening it to give David more air and his hands were still there, cool through David’s shirt but warm where their fingertips touched David’s neck and Raúl was looking at him like he was an idiot, but a lot like Raúl obviously thought Fernando was a goof sometimes. It was weird and David didn’t know what to do about it, which was why Raúl got to speak next. “All right, we’ll exorcise the house,” he said. “I just don’t want things to get worse in the process, is all I was trying to say. I don’t want to get hurt again and I don’t want anybody else to get hurt either.”

David looked up at him. “You should’ve just said that instead of sounding like such a fucking martyr.”

Silva snorted, then slapped a hand over his mouth and looked absolutely terrified with embarrassment. He still managed to grab Fernando’s wrist with his other hand, dragging it from David’s head, but he couldn’t do anything about Raúl. Who scrunched his brows together and pursed his lips and then _ruffled_ David’s hair. Also, he was smiling and looking highly uncomfortable yet genuine about it, but he’d messed with David’s hair _and_ he wasn’t drunk or Silva or freshly assaulted by a ghost. The bastard.

“You really have no filter,” Raúl pronounced, like it was the greatest discovery ever made. “God, that gets on my nerves.”

Somebody cleared his throat, and that was when David noticed Figo and Guardiola by his feet. Figo coughed into his hand, then used it to make the kind of small, vague, hugely attention-getting gesture that always made David want to walk right out. “So in the usual exorcism there’s a chance of—”

“Whatever, let’s fucking go already,” David muttered, starting to push himself up on his elbows.

“But I haven’t told you what we’re doing yet,” Figo protested.

David rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and you did a great job of trying to do that when you had the chance. Cut the crap already.”

Figo started to object again, but then he looked around and noticed everybody was starting to rise as well, so David was winning. He frowned and rubbed the side of his face. “I wasn’t kidding when I said there could be significant risks involved. I think before you make a choice, you should be informed about it and—”

“If it gets the ghosts out, then we’ll do it. Thank you, Luís, but I’ve made up my mind,” Raúl said firmly. Behind him, Fernando froze in an awkward half-crouch to stare at him in surprised adoration.

After a moment, Figo sighed and shrugged. “All right, but Pep can bear witness that I tried to give you the standard disclaimer and so forth, but you waived it.”

“I’m his lawyer,” Guardiola explained.

Everybody stopped and looked at Figo again, who just shrugged a second time. “Never hurts to be careful.”

“You’re more of an asshole than I am,” David said, and suddenly Fernando was looking at him with all that awe and no, damn it. No fucking till the stupid ghosts were settled and they didn’t have to deal with Figo and his lawyer and his lawyer’s slippery kitchen floor anymore.

Guardiola had finally lost that Zen attitude of his and then some, because he was looking at David’s neck like he wanted to snap it and he looked like he could really do it more than Fernando at his maddest did. But Figo was grinning for some reason. Grinning and measuring up David with his eyes and God, he needed a slap or a zillion. “And you’ll be perfect for this. All right, come on. We need to go shopping.”

* * *

An exorcism, as it turned out, required more chalk, beeswax candles, incense sticks that smelled a lot like David’s worst roommate ever who’d not showered in the two months they’d lived together, and many more bottles of holy water. Fortunately, Guardiola had that many bottles lying around. Unfortunately, Figo appeared to be on bad terms with the local parish.

“It’s a professional rivalry thing,” Figo said. “They like to think they’ve got a monopoly.”

Guardiola casually checked his watch. “Or you might have tried to do a sex ritual in a confessional.”

“That too,” Figo agreed, not missing a beat.

Standing there in the cathedral parking lot, David and Fernando exchanged glances. Then Fernando cleared his throat and bent a searching gaze on Figo. “You’re sure this will work.”

“It’ll work.” Figo’s big black sunglasses stared at Fernando. Frankly, the man looked more like a celebrity undertaker than a private investigator. Paranormal—whatever he investigated, which David was beginning to think was total crap anyway. Then Figo took off the shades and looked up with a face of total sobriety. “Mori, I would not put people at risk if I didn’t have true belief in myself and my methods _because_ I’ve seen them work. You can ask Pep.”

“Your lawyer,” David said skeptically.

“Well, yes, but only because he did get that damned poltergeist out of my file cabinet,” Guardiola calmly said. He smiled at Figo, who shifted in a way that would’ve been slightly uncomfortable if the man hadn’t put his sunglasses back on. “Otherwise I would have sued him till he signed over his soul. Those were—”

Of course the shades kept David from seeing Figo’s eyes, but Figo was a member of the exaggerated-gesture school and the roll of his head told David the eyes were also rolling. “Oh, you had backups, and you met your deadline. And don’t start—fine, it was with five minutes to spare but who drove you there?”

“Luís, you had my car keys and my trousers so neither of us really had a choice.” Then Guardiola checked his watch again, frowning. “Think someone should go in and check? I need at least an hour to set the table for my luncheon.”

Fernando opened his mouth, but David got his hand up first. But Fernando came in with him anyway. David couldn’t really blame him. The vibe between Figo and Guardiola was getting way too weird, and David’s quota for that was already overflowing.

* * *

Thankfully, the priest knew Raúl—who _didn’t_ , honestly?—and had been happy to bless the water for him for some class demonstration, or whatever the excuse had been. So now they were all standing in Raúl’s front yard, staring at the house and its dark windows, with their bottled holy water and incense and candles and chalk. About to go back in the damn thing and try this stupid exorcism, and if it didn’t work David really didn’t know what to do. 

Well, except that he was going to take Figo’s smug, leering head and stuff it into the nearest wall. They’d had to split into two cars and Fernando had driven Raúl’s since Raúl couldn’t work the pedals with his ankle, so somehow Figo had gotten Raúl into Guardiola’s car. The door had damn near clipped off David’s toes as he’d dove into the backseat with Raúl at the last minute, and then he’d had the privilege of sitting there while Figo tried everything short of asking Raúl if he wanted to come over and see some aura photos to set up a post-exorcism date. The only thing that’d kept David from jumping into the front seat and strangling Figo was the fact that Raúl would get all pissy about being defended. This whole liking Raúl thing was pretty fucking inconvenient, and especially when it came to _liking_ Raúl.

“If you’re nervous, that’s all right,” somebody said. Figo. Looking back at David.

Actually, everybody was, because they’d started moving forward and David didn’t, and David just bit the inside of his mouth to keep from ripping Figo a new one. He wasn’t nervous. The last thing he was, was nervous. For the love of the Virgin, if he could take having Fernando think he’d forced himself on Raúl and Silva playing haunted house to get his attention and Raúl touching his hair, he could take Raúl’s bastard ghostly relatives. He was an asshole. They were just dead.

“Ah, good,” Figo drawled as David stomped by him. “Nice to see good energy. We’ll need that.”

Not from what David could tell. After the initial door-opening and mad splashing of holy water, all they did was draw a chalk circle on the floor and then stand in it while Figo did all the work. Setting up candles and incense, dripping more holy water around, mumbling to himself—David wasn’t averse to letting Figo do that crap, but he would’ve liked to know what was going on, just in case Figo was hexing them while he was at it.

Something brushed the back of David’s neck and he hunched his shoulders, muttering at them to stop it. Then he shut up and twisted sharply around, but nobody was standing behind him. He turned back and Silva was looking with concern at him. David grabbed his neck and backed closer to the center of the circle. “I felt something.”

Silva opened his mouth and above their heads, the ceiling creaked loudly. Silva shut his mouth and fiddled with the candle in his hands, peering all around them. Fernando and Raúl had half-noticed as well, but they didn’t do more than wince because Fernando was busy arguing with Figo again and Raúl was busy trying to make Fernando stop.

“Once they figure out what’s going on, they seem to get rather upset,” Guardiola said. He didn’t seem all that worried about it, with one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other posed on his hip like some mag cover for pretentious cardigan-wearing men. For God’s sake, it was so hot outside that the roads were steaming, and even Raúl had opted to roll up his sleeves. “I guess it’s understandable, since they think it’s their home and they’re being kicked out, but try not to acknowledge them. The more you pay attention to them, the closer they come to winning.”

“Oh. Okay.” The ceiling creaked again, louder, and Silva flinched but made a visible effort not to stare around. “That sounds like good advice.”

“Pep, are you taking my job again?” Finally done, Figo got up off his knees and went over to his bag. He rooted through it while the noises from upstairs got progressively louder and more like muffled screams, then produced a book from it with a great flourish of his free hand. “Here we go.”

Guardiola took a lighter out of his pocket and lit his candle, then handed the lighter to Silva. “Well, to be honest, Luís, sometimes you’re too fond of annoying people to do it.”

Then again, David didn’t mind clothes so long as the person in them had a brain. He took back every nasty thought he’d ever had about Guardiola.

Figo looked hard at Guardiola before sighing, as if he was the victim here. He motioned for everybody to light their candles, then to hold hands with the candles stuck in between so they could stand in a circle. 

It took a couple minutes, since the only things keeping hot wax from burning their fingers were these cheap cardboard discs and they were constantly shifting. Also, Figo would only give one hand, which went to Pep, because he was holding a book in his other hand. The person on his other side would’ve had to stick his arm through Figo’s arm and of course Raúl was closest but no fucking way. Fernando got Raúl off to the side and David screwed up his distaste, shoved it down, and sacrificed his arm to Figo.

But finally they were all arranged, and just in time for the front door, which had been wide open, to slam shut all by itself. “Ignore that,” Figo said, and then he began reading from his book.

The moment he opened his mouth, the ghosts started acting up. A howling wind sprang up out of nowhere and tore violently at them: somebody’s cardboard disc went flying off towards the staircase, while Raúl’s shirt-tails ripped out of his trousers and flew up into his face. Raúl fought with it, shaking his head and trying to duck out of the cloth, but it only pressed harder, till David could see the outlines of his cheekbones and nose and wide-open mouth through it. The other man’s head-shaking got harder and Jesus, maybe he was suffocating—

“Hsst,” Guardiola hissed at David, cutting off David’s reflexive step forward. He shook his head hard and David took back the nice thought he’d had about him a few minutes ago. What the hell, did they want Raúl to die?

“Son of a—” Fernando craned down and somehow got a mouthful of Raúl’s flapping shirt, then jerked it sideways. Then the wind ripped it from his teeth, but at least he got it so it was twisted over Raúl’s shoulder.

A gasping, ashen Raúl promptly staggered so Fernando had to drag him up by one hand, then coughed repeatedly so Figo had to raise his voice to yelling to be heard over that and the wind. Figo hadn’t skipped a beat during the whole thing, and—and the candles hadn’t gone out. David knew that because a bunch of hot wax suddenly splattered over his hand and he cursed, trying to jerk away, only to end up dragging a dogged Silva with him. Silva had refused to let go of David’s hand, even though it looked like he’d gotten just as splattered. He was biting his lip and when his eyes met David, he was a hell of a lot more scared than he was acting.

“Leave me alone!” screamed somebody who wasn’t one of them. It sounded like a woman.

For some reason Figo lowered his voice. He’d been speaking in Latin or something anyway, so David had no idea what he was saying, but at least it’d sounded like it could fuck with somebody. But now he was talking so David couldn’t even hear him, could only see his moving lips to know he was still going, and was he getting freaked out too, damn him? He wouldn’t look up when David yanked on his arm, but just furrowed his brows some more.

Silva made a funny hiccupping noise, then whipped sharply forward so for a moment David thought he was falling on his face. He wasn’t, he was choking and bent over, and David looked down and he could _see_ something pressing into the flesh of Silva’s neck. Fingers—the outlines of somebody’s _hands_ and this was such bullshit and what good was that damn circle for and fuck this. “Get the fuck off him!” David snarled, trying to heave Silva back up. He was going to unhook his arm from Figo’s to help, but all of a sudden Figo snapped in his arm, trapping David’s against him. “Fucker. You motherfucking _assholes_! Stop that! What the hell’d he do to you? Fucking stop it before I come rip up your tombstone and piss on it, and piss on you, and—”

Well, somebody was listening to David. The same moment that Silva wheezed in relief, something got him by the neck and dragged him backwards so he was damn near breaking his neck to keep his feet down. Then it dragged him that bit more and he couldn’t keep his feet down, and it didn’t matter because great, he was floating again. Floating, being strangled, couldn’t breathe, funny lights flashing around him and God, was he fucking pissed off. 

Those ghosts thought they were mad? Because they what, had killed each other and now couldn’t stay in the house anymore? Like they _knew_ mad. Raúl hadn’t said but David knew his uncle and aunt had been rich assholes, with more money than sense, and they’d never had to put up with shit landlords, with getting thrown out on their ass from a job for something they hadn’t done, with getting fucked over by professors who cared more about their reputation than teaching. They’d never had to choose between a textbook and a meal. They’d never had to sit there and listen to Fernando go on and on about how Raúl scratched his nose, with every stupid anecdote being like a stab in the chest. They’d never realized they actually really liked a man they thought they’d hated, or nearly lost a good friend and lab partner and bedmate through their own blindness, and they’d sure as hell never had a week like David had just had. Was still having. David was so _fucking_ angrier than them right now.

David sucked in a breath. It hurt, his ribs were being crushed and his throat was only open about a needle’s eye’s width, but he got. It. In. Fucking ghosts. And then he got it out through gritted teeth. “ _Go to fucking hell_.”

The wind stopped. The strangling stopped. David fell. Hit his head. Of course.

“Oh, my God, the candle! He’s on fire!” Silva was shouting as David got knocked out _again_. At this rate, he could pay off next month’s electricity bill by volunteering for that head trauma study.

* * *

“Gotta say, Villa, I never knew you liked the student clinic so much,” Joaquín said, scribbling away on his clipboard. “Good thing is that the x-ray says you’re not seriously injured. Bad thing is that weird rumors are starting up about you and your…um…”

David batted off somebody’s hand and hauled himself into a sitting position on the examining table. “Joaquín, shut up.”

“Sure, Villa. Want a lollipop?” Joaquín stuck his clipboard under his arm, dug around in a pocket and actually held one out to David. He grinned. “Personality’s intact, too. I think you’re good to go.”

“I’d better be, you smartass shit,” David muttered. He ducked his head to feel at the newest lump on it, then looked up in time to see Silva taking the lollipop.

Silva looked embarrassed, but wasted no time in unwrapping it and sticking it in his mouth. “’s lime, David, they’re the best. Anyway, you’re okay! Except for your shirt, sorry. I think it’s too singed to save. But Figo says the exorcism worked!”

Figo moved out of the way to let Joaquín leave, then nodded. “House feels clean. If it’s not, I can always come back, but I think you did it.”

David opened his mouth, paused, and frowned. “Wait, what did I do? I thought you were doing it.”

“Oh, I was, but ghosts are funny. An exorcism ritual will always help loosen their grip on a place, but sometimes what you really need is to make it clear somebody stronger’s around and will fight them. And you made it clear you’ll stand up against them,” Figo said. “You’re not bad at it either. Have you ever thought about doing this professionally?”

The room was quiet. Figo stood there, looking sleek and superior. Guardiola wasn’t around, but then David saw him in the hall talking to somebody, and then Raúl and Fernando and Silva were all staring at Figo with David. Silva had even stopped sucking on his lollipop.

“You mean all I needed to do was tell them to fuck off enough times?” David said dangerously.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that—” was as far as Figo got before David leaped at him.

* * *

“I can’t believe you tried to strangle him,” Raúl said.

David shrugged. “You were thinking about it too.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Raúl held out for fifteen seconds before he sighed and pushed his hands into his hair. “Well, yes, I was annoyed, but not that much. Good God, David, I’m still friends with him and Pep.”

“And you _did_ tell the ghosts to fuck off, remember? It didn’t work the first time,” Silva said. He rubbed the side of his neck, looking thoughtful. “But you were running away at the same time. Huh. So maybe that was…but technically Figo didn’t fool us. He didn’t know that what you did would work till you did it, and Jesus, Guaje, getting half-killed is not a good way to find out! You have bruises all over your neck!”

“So does everybody else,” David said, pointing. “Okay, maybe not all from ghosts, but—”

“I’m sorry you had to get choked by ghosts to get to it, but I have to admit that seeing Figo that shocked is going to be a fond memory of mine,” Fernando mused, a faraway look of joy in his eye. Then he looked down at David and grinned, and damn it, he was too damn easy to watch when he looked like that.

But after a few seconds Fernando’s smile began to fade. He looked warily over his shoulder at the house, then grabbed his shoulder. Then he let go of that and put his hand on Raúl’s arm, just touching it, but that set off a whole confusing mess of emotions in David’s head, proving that it wasn’t all over.

Well, fuck it. Life was like that, and it wasn’t over because they weren’t dead. And they weren’t not-dead dead or whatever ghosts were either, so they had a right to stick around and have it not be over, and this was why David didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about himself. He never made much sense.

David got out his keys and went up the front steps. Somebody called his name, but he didn’t turn around because he knew it wasn’t anyone he didn’t want calling it. He unlocked the front door and went inside.

The others eventually filtered in after him. The house was quiet and empty, really _empty_ , in the way a house with no people running around in it should be. It was still half-done, with too much dark wood panel and rotten stairs, but it was a house.

“It’s okay,” David said.

Raúl glanced at him, then slowly turned around, looking at the place. His expression was kind of odd, opening up in a way David hadn’t really seen, except maybe on the couch in Raúl’s office when Raúl had been talking about his roots. He looked really, honestly happy, and hopeful, and it was a real change from his usual guarded expression.

“Yay.” Something brushed David’s arm and then Silva stepped up beside him, looking relieved and nervous all at once. Then he did a little twitch and took his hand away, glancing at it a little too long and huh, sometimes David could notice things. “But I have to be honest, it’s still kind of creepy. Are we keeping all that woodwork?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying, Raúl. If they’re really antique, we can always give them to a museum, but I don’t think they’re the kind of antique you need to keep around,” Fernando said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t say your relatives had great taste in interior decorating.”

Raúl pursed his lips, looking a little less happy. Then he sighed and shrugged. “Well, I’ll think about it. But first shouldn’t we finish the floors and that sort of thing?”

“No,” David said. He reached out and grabbed Silva’s hand, then tugged the other man along as he began walking purposefully towards the bedrooms. “First we should fuck. If that doesn’t wake up any ghost that’s left, then I don’t know what will. And I want to, because it’s been a fucking bad week except for that. And if it wasn’t already clear, I still want to fuck all of you and that wasn’t the ghosts and if any of you say it was, we’re going to have some problems. Because that’s bullshit.”

“Um,” from Silva. Blinking from Raúl and God, that was still annoying.

Forget the bedroom. David stopped and pushed Raúl down right there. He forgot he was holding Silva’s hand, so Silva went down too, and then Fernando caught up and was all worried about Raúl’s ankle, but he had to kneel on the floor to check that and then he couldn’t really miss that by then Raúl was more about making out than getting back up.

All right, it wasn’t really a solution. But there wasn’t one anyway, as far as David could tell. All there was, was just trying to get through things and saying fuck it to anything that got in the way, and things might get weird but they’d work out. He’d make them work out. It was all he could do.

Well, that and have sex on the floor in a freshly-dehaunted house with three men who got under his skin in different but equally annoying ways. He was just an asshole, after all, and they were worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> I threw in pretty much anything I could make fun off from the horror/slasher genre, so if parts seem like you've seen it in a movie or TV show or book, they probably are the references you think they are.
> 
> Originally written in 2009.


End file.
